Item Specification: The Babel FishCopy Anchor Link

"The Babel fish," said The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish."

— The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 6

The Babel fish is small, yellow, and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. Feeding on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it, it absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies to nourish itself with and excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the supplying brain. The speech patterns the carrier actually hears then decode the brainwave matrix fed into their mind by the Babel fish.

Universal Translation & First Insertion ExperienceCopy Anchor Link

The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language:

• Glass Jar Storage: Experienced roving researchers such as Ford Prefect carry a spare Babel fish wriggling around inside a small glass jar.
• Sensory & Aural Resolution: When Ford clapped his hand to Arthur Dent's ear aboard Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz's flagship as the Vogon captain began howling over the Tannoy (a violent noise that sounded like a man trying to gargle whilst fighting off a pack of wolves), Arthur felt the sudden sickening sensation of the fish slithering deep into his aural tract. Gasping with horror and scrabbling at his ear for a second or two, he slowly turned goggle-eyed with wonder—experiencing the aural equivalent of looking at a picture of two black silhouetted faces and suddenly seeing it as a picture of a white candlestick, or looking at a lot of coloured dots on a piece of paper which suddenly resolve themselves into the figure six and mean that your optician is going to charge you a lot of money for a new pair of glasses. He was still listening to the howling gargles, only now they had somehow taken on the semblance of perfectly straightforward English ("Howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl gargle gargle howl gargle gargle gargle howl slurrp uuuurgh should have a good time. Message repeats...").

Proof of the Non-Existence of God & Bloodiest Wars in CreationCopy Anchor Link

1. The Ontological Dead Giveaway: Because it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance, some thinkers have chosen to see the Babel fish as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God:
   • "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
   • "But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
   • "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
   • "Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
2. Oolon Colluphid's Bestseller: Most leading theologians claim that this argument is "a load of dingo's kidneys," but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.
3. Bloodiest Wars in History: Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.