42 Read online

  The significance for us is that some of the sunshine arriving at planet Earth passes through the different components of the atmosphere to warm an ocean, a rock, a leaf, or a sunbathing torso. Then, part of the energy re-emerges but with a new, longer, wavelength absorbed by the water vapour and CO2 molecules that had been left cold by the original incoming sunshine. This is a very good thing; without this effect the Earth would be an estimated 33°C colder—a frozen planet. But we are heading quickly to an unknown land, a new place where there may be too much of the good thing with planet Earth keeping more energy than is good for some or all of its forms of life—welcome to the test-tube.

  Working Around Circumnavigation

  Below the aluminium toes of Eros* in London’s Piccadilly Circus people rush on underground trains to tropical-sounding destinations like Arnos Grove, Ruislip, and Willesden Junction. But what if there were a new line, the Vertical Line, travelling down through the centre of the earth and coming out on the other side?

  Firstly it would be very, very, watch-me-Jeremy-Clarkson, quick. Gravity is so powerful that you will be dropping at 22 miles per hour after one second and will keep accelerating for exactly 21 minutes and 5 seconds more, assuming someone had remembered to suck the air from the tube. When you get to the sports pages of the Metro you will have reached a top speed at 27,000 mph at which precise point gravity starts to work in reverse so eventually easing you to a neat halt on the other side of the world exactly 42 minutes (and 12 seconds) later. Please mind the gap. Taking the Vertical line from Piccadilly Circus would get you through the world six minutes faster than using the Piccadilly line to reach Heathrow and only six minutes longer than going the other way to Cockfosters.

  Advice for travellers: The exact other side of the world to Piccadilly Circus is not a famous opera house pitched on Bennelong Point under a cerulean sky beside a happy Circular Quay replete with delicious frappucinos to slurp and schooners of chilled lager with condensation patterns to contemplate. No. An anti-climax awaits. You would ‘emerge’ submerged under a distinctly watery Pacific Ocean a full 575 miles to the south and east of New Zealand. For lovers of dry land the closest resource is 142 miles away on the Antipodes Islands (population none). Should the sub-Antarctic prove unsatisfactory it would require only 42 minutes to drop up to Piccadilly Circus.

  Beginners’ Guide to Practical Gravity Tubes

  The simple vastitude of the Pacific means that the destination boards above the boarding platform for gravity tubes in most cities and towns would just read ‘Pacific Ocean’. Examples of the few practical gravity tube routes with dryish land at both ends are:

  Depart Arrive Journey Time*

  Auckland, New Zealand Malaga or Seville, Spain. 42 minutes

  Abu Dhabi Pitcairn Island 42 minutes

  Jodphur, Pakistan Easter Island 42 minutes

  Perth, Australia Bermuda,

  The Triangle 42 minutes

  The question I can see you are considering posing is ‘What if gravity tubes weren’t vertical?’ Assuming you can purchase a few friction-less wheel bearings (try the aisle after perpetual motion machines in either Halfords or Home Depot) then almost magically every trip would still take…42 minutes and 12 seconds. For example, going from London Piccadilly Circus through to New York Central Station on 42nd Street would be 3451 miles taking the long distance route as the crow flies while taking the real point A to point B route through the earth’s crust almost halves the mileage and would take just forty two minutes by gravity tube.

  Eight Miles High

  Being the fabled eight miles high (42,240 ft) on a scheduled airline service is difficult to organise*. Passenger aircraft typically cruise at up to only 41,000 feet, (FL410). While most Boeing aircraft—including 747s which can be flown at FL450—and some others are certified to operate above 41,000ft flight safety rules require that over FL410 one pilot must be breathing oxygen through a mask in case of rapid cabin depressurisation caused unconsciousness.

  The supersonic Concordes and Concordskis (Soviet Tu-144, only 55 scheduled flights) operated at up to 56/58,000 feet or 11 miles high. Since both are now grounded, getting to the requisite eight miles high usually means either flying by private jet or joining the military.

  Eight Miles Low / Subterranean Borehole Blues

  Earlier loose talk of gravity tubes providing attractively-priced free travel, like the England football team’s chances of ever succeeding again in a World Cup is vanishingly far off because the world is proving very difficult to perforate.

  The best shot so far got just one tenth of one percent of the distance needed to break through to the other side. But at 40,230 feet you still probably wouldn’t want to be dropping your car keys down the Kola Superdeep Borehole (KSDB), unless of course you really needed to hear how long they would take to hit the bottom.

  The KSDB project was started by the Soviets in 1970, a few months after news of the American moon landing. The location was near their border with Norway, selecting a singularly solitary spot where some Sami semi-nomadic souls herd reindeer and practise tongue-twisters. After nineteen boring years (few really felt the love for the communism thing) the project was closed down, followed in short order by the Soviet government. The KSDB hole fell more than a mile and a half short of the planned depth of 49,000ft. The unexpected problem had been the increasing heat of the earth. At 180°C and heading north it was becoming impossible to keep metal drill bits sufficiently cool to cut the hard, gneissic rock.

  Very sadly President Brezhnev’s wholly admirable ambition of being the first country to possess a 42,000 ft hole remains unfulfilled but for us there is the warming consolation that the radius of the deepest hole into the world measures 4.2 inches.

  2.5 million Oar Strokes

  In June 2010, Roz Savage (42) from England compressed an 8000 mile journey of two and a half million oar strokes into 140 key strokes by tweeting…

  [5.209S, 145.806E] Arrived. Completed my row across the Pacific Ocean today. (@Vitiaz Strait near Madang)

  … to announce to the world that she had become the first woman to row solo across the Pacific Ocean. The two year journey from San Francisco to Papua New Guinea included pauses in Hawaii and Kiribati (said kiri-bass) and was partly to raise awareness of the dangers of climate change and the quantities of plastics polluting the oceans.

  The first person to row across the Pacific from America to Australia had also been English, one 36 year old Peter Bird in 1983. Determined also to be the first person to row the Pacific from West to East as well he disappeared in 1996 on his fifth attempt having met extreme weather not long after rowing out from Vladivostock in Russia.

  Darwin’s Point

  The most distant part of Hawaii from Na’alehu is the snack-less Kure Atoll. It is 1566 miles to the north west of the Shaka Bar and Restaurant (page 103) and is the world’s most northerly coral atoll.

  At 28° 24’ North its existence is significant. It was predicted to be there by Charles Darwin in 1842. He never saw or knew of Kure but reasoned that coral atolls could not exist any further north, the water temperature being too cold for suitable corals to flourish and grow upwards while the volcano beneath them was depressing the earth’s crust and descending beneath the ocean surface. This latitude is called the Darwin Point. Beyond the Darwin Point the Hawaiian island chain continues all the way to Alaska but beneath the surface in the form of submerged seamounts and guyots (flat-topped sunken atolls).

  The Darwin Point theory remained unproved for many years after his death. At least four 19th and early 20th century expeditions returned home having been unable to drill deep a deep enough hole to show that atolls are all perched on a, still sinking, volcano. But as a part of the US atomic bomb testing programme in the summer of 1951 at Enewatek Atoll, US Marshall Islands, two suitably deep holes were being drilled and just before 4,200 ft the core samples that had consistently been limestone were suddenly olivine basalt rock. Darwin had been proved right and the celebration the next y
ear was literally the world’s biggest bang—the detonation of Mike, the first ‘hydrogen’ bomb. Still the ninth biggest nuclear explosion ever, it was somewhat more powerful than anticipated and the whole of one of the islands comprising Enewatek Atoll no longer exists.

  The surf breaking on the living coral forming a reef at Enewatek represents around 49 million years of upward growth from the coral exactly compensating for the downward sinking of the original volcano. Using a local human dimension as a ruler, the Enewatek volcano has been, and still is, descending by the width of your little fingernail every 350 years, ‘every’ being the crucial word when trying to comprehend the idea of time in matters geological. In 147 million years a canoe and paddle will be useful for the astrophysicists working at Hawaii’s Astronomy Precint when it too will be another sandy coral atoll.

  * When dying at the age of 71 after a climb in the French Alps he locked his hotel room door to prevent the ingress of a doctor in order to obviate the possibility of any life-shortening clinical intervention and make life’s last egress, one might say, with just a Whymper. The undertakers were less readily daunted as Whymper’s headstone—pleasingly similar in shape and size to the Matterhorn—stands to be admired in a Chamonix cemetery.

  * Keen-bean Greek peep geeks know he isn’t Eros but his kid-brother Anteros – the god of requited love.

  * Journey time excludes parking, check-in, excessive excess baggage negotiations, immigration, security, so-called duty-frees, boarding, delays on the tarmac, pre-descent safety announcements and just having to wait.

  * Exceptions are 747s flying some Pacific routes which may sometimes operate at up to 43,000ft while returning to the USA.

  Douglas Adams

  The Great Gig in Earl’s Court

  In January 1994 Douglas Adams joined a select group. He became a castaway on the BBC Radio 4 show Desert Island Discs (created 1942) in which a guest (there are 42 per year) chooses and talks about the eight records they would want on a hypothetical desert island which has a hypothetical record player. The host with Douglas Adams was Sue Lawley. Breaking with protocol he had posted his list of records on the interweb before the show for the benefit of fans in different countries wondering aloud about his forthcoming choice of music. Douglas Adams’ desert island discs were, in order:

  Man of Mystery—The Shadows

  Drive My Car—The Beatles

  Italian Concerto—JS Bach

  B Minor Mass—JS Bach

  Schubler Chorale Number 5—JS Bach

  Requiem—Ligeti

  Hearts and Bones—Paul Simon

  All of Me—Ella Fitzgerald

  The interweb message signed off with a joke: ‘The list is completely wrong, of course. I’ve been trying to choose my eight since I was about 10 years old, and in the end I just panicked.’ Some of his favourites in contemporary music that didn’t make it into the eight were: Procul Harum, Pink Floyd, Kate Bush, Elvis Costello, and Dire Straits. The Schubler Mass and the Italian Concerto were to be the first and last pieces of music played at his memorial service.

  Between the music Douglas Adams spoke with excitement about computers and the interweb and that the Hitch-hiker’s film was at last going to be made—it wasn’t—and of feelings he believed were akin to being mildly manic-depressive, sometimes having massive amounts of energy and periods of not being able to think of ideas.

  The program famously allows one luxury on the island, a choice guests have used in both prosaic and startling ways. Stephen Fry wanted a suicide pill, John Cleese asked for Michael Palin, and John Peel had a football. Douglas Adams requested a left-handed Martin D-28 guitar. Castaways also get to choose one book. Douglas Adams, comedy writer, chose a non-existent omnibus of all the golfing stories written by, comedy writer, PG Wodehouse. By the end of the year, behold and lo, BBC Radio 4 was broadcasting a series featuring tales from the most famous Wodehousian golfing character, The Oldest Member.

  Pink Floyd got the opportunity to perform on stage with the talented Mr Adams on October 24th 1994 at the Earl’s Court, London in a gig for his 42nd birthday. DNA played lead guitar on two tracks from The Dark Side of the Moon; Brain Damage and Eclipse.

  Douglas Adams died trying to keep fit. The day was 11 May 2001. He was in a gym exercising with his trainer when he suffered a fatal heart attack. He had been in California working on the script in yet another bash at making the seemingly mythical Hitch-hiker’s movie, and with his wife and young daughter was enjoying life in swanky Montecito on the warm south-slope gently carrying America down from the dry chaparral of the Santa Ynez Mountains into an infinity of Pacific Ocean. He liked living there. He was 49. His body was cremated in America and his ashes buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery where a headstone stands. A memorial service held at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields Church on London’s Trafalgar Square was the first online broadcast from a place of worship. The distinction might have gained an interesting reaction. Douglas Adams differentiated strongly both between being agnostic (‘silliness’) and atheist, and between merely believing there isn’t a God and being convinced. Parts of a bittersweet day, including funny memories and fine speeches from his friends, can still be seen and heard on the BBC website where it is, as I write, filed/hidden as ‘cult’ which may be a reference to St Martin’s-in-the-Fields Church or Douglas Adams or both, but whatever the reason the simplest route to see and hear the poignant echoes of an exceptionally notable life is by using Google to search for ‘Douglas Adams Memorial Service’.

  Choosing the Right Parents

  Polly Adams’ dad was aged 42 on the day of her birth, he was Douglas Adams. Her mother is Jane Belson, who some three years earlier had married Douglas Adams.

  In Nick Webb’s official Douglas Adams biography Wish You Were Here, he describes the secular christening party held on Polly Adams’ first birthday complete with non-godparents who in a mock contract agreed to be vicarious supreme being substitutes, and to perform a range of interesting duties including walking holidays in Iceland, long weekends in Venice and commiserating over the curmudgeonliness of the parents. Douglas Adams read Keats’ sonnet On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer, a poem used to describe a major change in understanding, of seeing the whole picture.

  DA In The DB

  Christopher Adams was Douglas Adams’ father and had a very remarkable car. After a painful divorce, Douglas Adams’ father had remarried within three years to a wealthy widower from a Glasgow shipbuilding family whose husband had been killed in the war, and had two older daughters. She generously paid for Douglas and Sue Adams’ education in fee-paying schools, Christopher Adams working as a probation officer. He was also a probation officer who drove an Aston Martin DB5. The DB5 was the Aston Martin of Aston Martins. It was the car driven by James Bond in the cinema. The teenage Douglas Adams had the experience of roaring around Europe in the ultimate head-turner. He can only have been the envy of any school-friend with even a remote interest in spies and cars.

  Jane Belson, Douglas Adams’ widow, allowed biographer Nick Webb access to his papers where he found Aston Martin magazines and pictures of the car with his father. And of course there is the DB which in the spy cipher of even a semi-competent agent means that when DA is 41 then DB is 42. For Christopher Adams, at least, an Aston Martin was close to being a part of the meaning of life. Douglas Adams also enjoyed interesting, exotic and powerful cars the list including a patriotic blue MG, Porsche 911, Porsche 928, VW Golf cabriolet, Lexus, and Mercedes 500. ‘Like bringing a Ming vase to a football game’ was Douglas Adams’ assessment of driving a Porsche in London.

  1, 2, …42

  On what would have been Douglas Adams’ 51st birthday Professor Richard Dawkins, a friend who spoke at his memorial service, delivered the inaugural Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture on the subject of the strangeness of science. Douglas had written that one of his books about evolution, The Blind Watchmaker, had had a profound effect on his understanding of the science. Richard Dawkins was to aptly dedicate his
book The God Delusion to Douglas Adams using one of his most loved quotations: ‘Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?’

  Professor Marcus du Sautoy, who succeeded Professor Dawkins as the Simonyi* Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, delivered the lecture in 2010. The subject was Forty two. His lecture described how Douglas Adams’ Ultimate Answer really had recently become key to something long awaited by math buffs; the enabling of furthering understanding of the pattern of distribution of prime numbers as—drum roll here perhaps, then definitely followed by a big crash of cymbals—the very important third moment of the Riemann zeta function, it becoming part of one of the world’s craziest sequences of numbers which—now—goes 1, 2, 42.

  Python VII

  Douglas Adams made a brief appearance in episodes 42 and 44 of the British legend, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. He also wrote some of the fourth TV series, Douglas Adams and ex-Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band member, Neil Innes, being the only non-Pythons to receive writing credits.

  With the Dalek-Botherers

  Douglas Adams worked as a script editor and also wrote twelve episodes for the BBC TV series Doctor Who, which has, according to the BBC, appeared on television in 42 countries.