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Comment by fuzztester | Hacker News Reader

Why "thanks.*fish"? (regex, chill ;)

I know it is a saying, have read it before, but would prefer to hear the explanation from a person rather than Google.

Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy

To add to this, it is revealed in Hitchhikers that dolphins are super intelligent extraterrestrials. "So long and thanks for all the fish" is the superintelligent dolphins farewell to the last of earth/hummanity.

that's rather finny :)

or fishy.

if they are extraterrestrials, wtf are they doing on terra, or rather, in / under oceania?

/jk

also, no way they can be superintelligent, if they came here, even once. bcoz, u no, shipz propellers, orcas, etc.

I'd say Douglas Adams novels are full of superintelligent and/or superpowered entities that don't always think things through properly. There's a serious Murphy's Law flavor to his scenarios, even if you're the President of the Galaxy or the Man Who Rules the Universe or a planetary engineer or the most intelligent robot ever built or whatever. You're still going to trip and fall, or experience unrequited love, or get stranded on a boring planet, or have an embarrassing misunderstanding, or concoct a wacky scheme that goes wrong somehow.

Given human events, he was not wrong in that conclusion. (If we even consider ourselves super intelligent)

astute - you and gp both.

I thought it was the mice that were the super intelligent extraterrestrials?

The mice were the mechanism by which the hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings observed their experiment. The experiment being "what is the Ultimate Question?" by running a 10 million year simulation.

I believe we were only the 3rd most intelligent on Earth, or something like that? Both dolphins and mouse being more intelligent.

Heard of the book, but have not read it, 41 times so far. Next time ;)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_(number)

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