Google’s Doomsday Doodle: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Armageddon

Google, masters of the political language known as doublespeak, randomly paid homage to author Douglas Adams’s 61^st would-be birthday (if he were still alive) yesterday, March 11, 2013.  The reason they have chosen the lackluster milestone of 61 to celebrate a man hallmarked as an ‘international phenomenon’ (Wikipedia) remains a mystery but anyone who visited Google today was greeted with another Google doodle, this time a tribute to his great Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or as some geeks would have it, H2G2.

But what appears to one person as a seemingly sweet tribute to an international favorite comes off to another as a bit haphazard, and, well, creepy.  Some have even taken further meaning from today’s doodle to predict something far more sinister for the near future of mankind.

Several of my friends who I asked about the doodle, without knowing my personal feelings on it described it as “morbid” and leaving them feeling “lonely”.  I paid particular attention to that adjective, “lonely”.  It is an emotion that it evoked for me, and one that has left me quizzically searching the vast databases of the history of google, their doodles, and others’ reactions to them.

A play by play of today’s doodle goes as follows:

A babelfish is inserted into a human’s head.  The ‘babelfish’ is an animal in The Guide that instantly translates any language you hear once it’s inside your head.  However, the sketch is very simple and shape based and only shows this mechanical looking device being implanted into someone’s brain and thought and speech bubbles popping up around the human head as the device transmits a signal, as if the device itself were dictating the figure’s thoughts and speech.  Upon closer inspection, the skit is actually of a babelfish going into the head of a stick figure and a speech bubble in one language popping up and the fish transmitting a signal to translate it, which is then displayed in another language as the figure’s thoughts.  But the entire skit takes place over only a few seconds and I had to watch it about four times to make out the storyline.

The next skit is a close-up of our planet that pans out to these words.  True, MOST people on earth are good or too sedated to be dangerous but a chain is only as strong as its weakest links.  It only takes one person with a small digit and a happy trigger finger to blow us all up.

Next is this poor fellow.  He is not having the best day.  In a strange sequence of events, the little figure falls over repeatedly any time he stands upright until finally falling to this sad position.  From here he takes off and flies up into the clouds.  Poor little guy was fighting a losing war until he finally gives up and goes up to be with the angels.

So apparently the secret to flying is you must fall first but this just looked to me like a really sad slow struggle that ended in a little person going to heaven.

Moving on, another unfortunate little blue guy takes a sip from a cup and then is crushed under a giant bar of gold.  This is an omen to all of those thinking that a return to the gold standard would NOT be absolutely devastating for the so-called economy.  According to my geek friends it is actually a skit depicting the effects of Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters but if you got that reference then you really know your Guide.

This skit shows a cabin of three people in a spaceship jumping over a galaxy and taking on the forms of a penguin, a ball of yarn, and a little man flipped on his head to be upside down.  This seems to be completely random but in fact, the upside down man can be a reference to The Hanged Man in a stack of tarot cards.  The designer of the Rider-Waite tarot card deck wrote this of the upside down Hanged Man:

“It has been called falsely a card of martyrdom, a card a of prudence, a card of the Great Work, a card of duty [...] I will say very simply on my own part that it expresses the relation, in one of its aspects, between the Divine and the Universe.  He who can understand that the story of his higher nature is imbedded in this symbolism will receive intimations concerning a great awakening that is possible, and will know that after the sacred Mystery of Death there is a glorious Mystery of Resurrection.” (The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, A. E. Waite)

Waite also ascribes these keywords with the Hanged Man:

Sacrifice, Letting go, Surrendering, Passivity, Suspension, Acceptance, Renunciation, Patience, New point of view, Contemplation, Inner harmony, Conformism, Non-action, Waiting, Giving up.

Douglass Adams, who also wrote the Doctor Who series, included the Hanging Man in episode two of the Doctor Who story, “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” when Morgana shows the Doctor the card as a symbol of himself. (Wikipedia)  Finally, and not related to Adams but interesting still, many of us remember the infamous scene from The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus in which the late Heath Ledger is found hanging from a bridge after pulling the Hanged Man card from a tarot deck.

Back to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe doodle skits we have this next in line:

A green face (green for ill) sneezes out a cloud of snot-mist and this little bug comes springing out reaching out its arms as the face smiles at it, seemingly proud with himself.  Of course this is meant to signify a galaxy being born from a sneeze but really it just looks like a barely shrouded reference to the spreading of germs and disease.

Next we are shown who will inherit the earth after the humans are dead from the massive plagues that will ravage us to extinction.  Incidentally, rodents were the carriers of the largest plague in scale in recorded history, The Black Death.  The skit shows a human lecturing about rodents which pans out to a dolphin lecturing about humans and then a mouse lecturing about dolphins.  Who will be there to tell the story of mankind when all of us are gone?

Don’t forget to bring a towel!  Sorry.  I had to go there.  Next is the telling of the towel.  However, for some odd reason Google has chosen to make its towel green and upon first inspection it looks like a note of fiat currency.  From the forums online I found that the original towel from H2G2 is blue with yellow stars and then later pink.  Other forms of the towel have taken the form of white with red typing on it, “Don’t Panic” but never has there been a reference to a green towel.  Anyway, the little green fiat note floats around on the screen and turns into a beach towel for a little orange man to lie on until the waters get too high and he uses it as a sail on his raft.  Note the crescent shape of the sail.  The green note goes on to protect the figure from aliens, beasts, and other threats, which is why the little figure embraces it fiercely at the end with little blue hearts floating over his head.  We know what Google loves.

Next, the bureaucrats kill all life on earth.  A little green alien signs a paper presented to him by one alien, stamps another paper presented to him by a different alien, and then waves his arm and commands a plant to die.  Google didn’t even have to stretch for that one, it actually happens in the story.  Vogons are responsible for destroying all life on earth.  Here, Adams describes the various government officials on Earth, oops, I mean Vogons. “They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders – signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.”

Next is the story of the supercomputer.  The computer is able to deduce that E=MC².  Fun fact, the next quote is from Albert Einstein: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” I bet you weren’t expecting me to be able to make a reference from that one…

The next skit is of course the retelling of the two scientists that ask the supercomputer the ‘Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything’ Many days and moons pass as the computer calculates until they are old men.  The computer spits out “42” as a response to the Ultimate Question, which is never revealed itself.  The fact that the question is never revealed to the readers is significant.  It symbolizes the trickle of knowledge and how useless and pedantic an answer is without knowing the question.  As for 42, is it significant?  Adams said this: “The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ’42 will do’. I typed it out. End of story.”  End of story.  Incidentally, this is the last skit before the series starts over.  So, perhaps, as another blogger has posed, and though I do not necessarily agree with the rest of his conclusions I did find this last one very impressionable: “Is the end of story the end of life? In the first image the door opens and reveals an artificial life form or robot. Is that the end run the Illuminist’s desire presented in the SINGULARITY?” (Conspiracy Cafe)

The first google ‘doodle’ showed up in 1998 when founders placed a stick figure behind the second ‘o’ to indicate their attendance at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert.  Since then Google has created over 1000 doodles celebrating various events, people, and concepts all around the world on their homepages.  Controversy is not new to Google’s doodles and I am sure we are to see plenty more of this dark imagery where that came from.

As a closing argument, here are some episode titles from the Doctor Who series, again taken from Conspiracy Café.

“The Nightmare Begins” 13 November 1965 22:55 9.1 Only stills and/or fragments exist

“Day of Armageddon” 20 November 1965 24:25 9.8 16mm t/r

“Devil’s Planet” 27 November 1965 24:30 10.3 Only stills and/or fragments exist

“The Traitors” 4 December 1965 24:42 9.5 Only stills and/or fragments exist

“Counter Plot” 11 December 1965 24:03 9.9 16mm t/r

“Coronas of the Sun” 18 December 1965 24:45 9.1 Only stills and/or fragments exist

“The Feast of Steven” 25 December 1965 24:36 7.9 Only stills and/or fragments exist

“Volcano” 1 January 1966 24:42 9.6 Only stills and/or fragments exist

“Golden Death” 8 January 1966 24:38 9.2 Only stills and/or fragments exist

“Escape Switch” 15 January 1966 23:37 9.5 16mm t/r

“The Abandoned Planet” 22 January 1966 24:34 9.8 Only stills and/or fragments exist

“The Destruction of Time”

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