Want to reimagine the apocalypse with style, science, and satire? Dive into the "Hitchhiker's Guide to Extinction" — a collaborative effort blending hard science fiction, AI-powered visualisations, drama, and dinner theatre to address themes of biodiversity, extinction, and democracy. Blast off into creative storytelling that’s as thoughtful as it is hilarious
# Core Themes
We aim to provide a broad theme within which a diverse set of independent work can be situated. There is freedom to create your own individual or group work, ranging across all of history, time and space - focussing on science, narrative or pure whimsical fantasy.
Everyone can have their own space, yet we can provide liminal and experimental spaces for collaboration and narratives that cross each other. As a hard science fiction, it is possible to focus on purely the science part, or the fictional part or both.
Playing on Douglas Adams’ famous satire, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, this initiative seeks to blend science, drama, education, and technology to create vivid narratives about the apocalypse — in all its tragic, comedic, and speculative dimensions.
# Privacy and Identity
As a federated hypertext, it is possible to provide an ecosystem of spaces, each with their own editorial policy - from this is my creative space, to collective playful spaces. There can be children-friendly guides, to satirical darker story worlds - and each space can enforce it's own rules about who can contribute and who is able to view or take part based on your Hitchhiker Identity]].
# Values and Vision Though dystopian in flavour, the ultimate objective isn't doom but imagination, participation, and recovery. Using extinction as both metaphor and reality, the project taps into deep ecological and political themes while embracing the playfulness of sci-fi satire. It’s about empowering communities — from schools to universities — to combine hard science, artistic expression, and technological innovation. It allows us to look at real problems through fictional and speculative lenses while remaining anchored in citizen science and democratic engagement.
# Labs
These labs or research groups interweave their outputs to build comprehensive, scientifically inspired, creatively anchored thought-experiments in visual form.
The approach includes a multidisciplinary, three-part structure to build and present visionary apocalypse narratives:
- Hard Scifi Lab: Investigates and compiles apocalyptic scenarios and extinction events. - Scriptwriting Lab: Writes vivid scene-setting stories for use in visual generation. - Visualisation Lab: Focused on mastering AI video rendering, editing, and transitions.
# Structure
# Building Trust All of this will feed into an open, cooperative, and creative platform named **Hitchhikers.Earth** — combining: - Student-led research wikis - Video documentation - AI prompts - Interactive maps - Visualisations and games By building a modular framework integrating hypertext notebooks, AI tools, and community performance, "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Extinction" becomes more than a project — it becomes an open template for addressing global crises through radical imagination.