Published on 22 April 2025 by Robbie Stamp

A Wildly Improbable Declaration and Invitation

For Douglas Adams, 1952 to 2001

This document travels at the speed of trust.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Entry Update, 2042

A history of hitchhikers.earth, a Wildly Improbable Thing

Back in 2026, a number of people, quite a large number in the end, looked around at the state of affairs and decided that things did not have to be this way.

So they, rather wisely, went back to Douglas Adams’s description of the famous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy itself.

“In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.”

And they chose not to panic.

And they remembered something else Douglas had said.

“The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts have been strenuously bent to fit…”

And so they began to build hitchhikers.earth. A wildly improbable thing indeed. Member-owned. Built on the DNA of the first Earth Edition of the Guide, h2g2.com, and twenty five years of Field Research. An economy shaped by the people creating it. And absolutely not for sale to anyone called Sirius Cybernetics.

If you are reading this, someone thought you might be the sort of person who would want to help make this real. That may be because you know your Hitchhiker’s. It may be because someone thought you might like the wit and philosophy and universe view that underpins it. Either way, this is an invite. An invite to help us think and build, to work with and honour many kinds of intelligence, many kinds of experience, human and non-human. You do not need to be a fan.

In April 1999, Douglas Adams launched the Earth Edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy live on Tomorrow’s World on the BBC. Twenty five years later, h2g2.com is still going, held together by love and sticking plaster, quietly tended by an extraordinary group of Hitchhikers and Field Researchers, and held today by Wildly Improbable Ltd: Robbie Stamp, one of the original founders with Douglas, and Brian Larholm, who has done his share of the love and the sticking plaster. Sirius Cybernetics owns no piece of us. And it rests on a unique global legacy and some rather interesting rights, to do with building the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for real.

A Declaration

We, the Researchers of h2g2.com, the Earth Edition of that wholly remarkable guidebook to the meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything known as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, can look back with some pride on the last quarter century.

We accomplished some pretty cool things. A considerable archive of Guide entries. Ten books. Connections between people around the planet who might otherwise never have found each other.

Back in the day, the idea was simple. We were not building a fan site. We were making the Guide real.

When h2g2 first launched, Douglas Adams described the idea like this:

“We’re off to a great start. We have the first snowflake. Now let’s build a blizzard.”

What We Want to Do Now

Imagine rewilding the Guide. The Guide as a thing that feels like a book, only alive: pages you turn, places you bookmark, marginalia you come back to, experiences you have. Public squares and gardens, highways and byways where more people can guide more people to more things they know and care about. Wild places too, and the lives in them. Atoms as well as bits, real rooms and real gatherings, energy fields and the occasional superintelligent shade of blue. Guides written as they always have been, and as podcasts, videos, performances, places, graphics and beautiful art and visualisations. Trails that lead somewhere unexpected. Places where people can get productively lost.

That place is hitchhikers.earth, a member-owned digital mutual society, built on the wit and wisdom and spirit of playfulness that Douglas himself infused into the first Earth Edition of the Guide. A way of honouring everything that has gone before, and bringing new things into being. A sufficient number of people coming together as members gives them the power to make their own decisions.

Together, members create a new kind of economy. What counts as value, and how it gets exchanged, is decided by the people creating it. Money, attention, time, skill. Value will flow through membership and patronage, and through a member’s stake in what we build together. To be plain about it, because the lawyers among our number will want us to be: this is an invitation to a stake in a mutual society, not a punt on a startup. You are joining something, not buying into an exit.

Wildly Improbable Ltd intends to transfer its rights into the new structure once the necessary legal and constitutional framework exists. Returns to the rights holders and investors will be capped. Real caps, not pretend ones, written into the legal structure itself rather than left to good intentions. The exact instrument, which we are calling the Dolphin Fund, is one of the things the Hitchhiker Fellows will build, in the open. A significant share will go into Foundations supporting the wider work. Not extracted by distant squillionaires. Not sold out from under the people who produce it.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Entry Update, 2026

Social Networks (continued)

Social networks were once built by small groups of engineers who hoped to make communication easier. Later examples were built by very large companies who discovered that helping humans connect was an extremely effective way of learning what those humans might like to buy.

Individuals became “users”, and users became something else.

They were breakfast.

We think it might be time to try a different model.

A different model that does things, not just talks about them. The Guide as a place where members propose projects, fund them together, and see them through. Working title: Base 42. Think it up, get it funded, get it done.

And the Earth Edition of the Guide should know that Earth is not just human Earth. Douglas’s favourite of his own books was Last Chance to See. He and Mark Carwardine went looking for animals on the brink of disappearance. The kakapo, the Komodo dragon, the Yangtze river dolphin. The Guide should remember them. They are Hitchhikers too.

Now for the Really, Really Improbable Part

(Forty-two, if you have somehow reached this point in life without being told, is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, calculated over seven and a half million years by a computer called Deep Thought. The Question itself was never quite established. This has never stopped anyone, and it is not about to stop us.)

And imagine 4.2 billion members of hitchhikers.earth, each paying their 42 in pounds or dollars or euros or rupees, because they looked around at the world in 2026 and thought it really did not have to be this way. Wildly improbable. But maybe, just maybe…

4.2 Things You Can Do

How do you help make this real? You can bring treasure, or you can bring time. Both help the wildly improbable become a little more probable.

Treasure. Become a Patron Fish. An individual or organisation who backs the next phase financially, or with significant in kind support. How do they do that? In one of two ways.

Back a Fellow. Fellows work in 42 week chunks of time, each leading one of the workstreams that build the legal, constitutional and technical foundations. Would you back a Fellow, or two or three?

Or support the Towel Team. The core of people who keep the work going day to day. Tending is often the bit that struggles most to get support, and the bit nothing happens without.

Time. Become a Hitchhiker. Writers, programmers, designers, theatre people, governance thinkers. The doers and the curious. All this leads to the First Global Hitchhikers Congress: one anchor event, 42 satellite events around the planet.

A few coins. The 0.2. A cup of tea or the cost of a towel. Small contributions add up when enough people make them.

What Guides Us?

What guides us in our own lives? And what does it mean to be a guide to someone else? We’re always finding out. The Guide itself has never been absolutely sure, which is perhaps why it has always been worth writing.

Douglas Adams understood that the universe is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose. He also understood the opposite temptation:

“Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it.’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the idea that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it.”

We are trying not to be the puddle. So this is, formally and genuinely, a Request for Guidance.

If you can see further than we can from where you stand, tell us what you see. If you are a superintelligent shade of blue, please be in touch. If you think of something we haven’t thought of yet, don’t panic. Send it our way. The Guide collects such things. Whatever the right thing turns out to be, doing it together is how we find out.

One promise about how we build. We will make strenuous efforts to keep open the spaces for the Non-Gens, those who want nothing to do with Generative AI anywhere near their own creativity, and who for very good reasons would rather their part of the universe stayed in pen and ink. The Guide is big enough for both.

And one ambition. For the rest of us, there is a real shot at owning our own AI rather than renting our minds. An intelligence that belongs to the members, like everything else here. Where your data does not go off to train someone else’s machine. Built in the open, run on our own kit where we can. Wildly improbable, naturally. Also, it turns out, buildable.

General Notes for a Small Planet

Pan-Galactic

“All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.”

Douglas Adams

We encourage participation from people of whatever age who want to work together and who are sometimes willing to accept that they might be wrong about something.

No Spitting

This started as a joke. Then we realised it was not a joke at all. Do not mess up the place. We live here. For this reason our community will continue to moderate. We really will tend to our gardens.

Beware The Leopard

There really is one, although not in a locked cabinet because we are very humane. Also it is metaphorical.

As founder Robbie Stamp says, this is not another dystopian free for all. We will have governing bodies and clear responsibilities. Who gets to make what decisions where matters to us.

We rather like the idea of Hitchhiker Assemblies. Something a bit like the Citizens’ Assemblies movement, only with slightly more towels and, naturally, forty two members.

A Final Thought

Potatoes

“It is a mistake to think that you can solve any major problems just with potatoes,”

Douglas Adams

He was probably right.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Don’t Panic. Be in touch.