Species Dossier: Earthlings (Homo Sapiens)Copy Anchor Link

Earthlings are a carbon-based bipedal life form indigenous to the small, unregarded blue-green planet Earth (Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha). Their technological accomplishments include digital wristwatches, nuclear fission, and sliced bread, yet they have persistently failed to understand why an electronic book with the words DON'T PANIC on its cover should be taken seriously.

Key Characteristics & AdaptationsCopy Anchor Link

• Stating the Very Obvious ("Exercising Their Lips"): One of the things Ford Prefect always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very, very obvious—such as "It's a nice day", or "You're very tall", or "Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right?", or Arthur Dent repeating "It's dark... No light. Dark, no light" aboard the Vogon flagship. Ford initially theorized that if human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably seize up; after a few months' observation he replaced this with a second theory that if they don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working; and eventually he abandoned that theory too as obstructively cynical, deciding he quite liked human beings after all while remaining desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn't know about.
• Vulnerability to Teasers: Because pre-demolition Earth had not yet made formal interstellar contact, isolated rural humans were occasionally buzzed by teasers—rich kids from advanced worlds with nothing to do who land beside a poor unsuspecting soul whom nobody will ever believe and strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennae on their heads and making beep beep noises.
• Towel Affinity & Cornflakes Nostalgia: An Earthling armed with a fresh towel is considered remarkably resilient, though when confronted simultaneously with Dentrassi underwear, Sqornshellous mattresses, and a man from Betelgeuse holding up a Babel fish, an Earthling may desperately wish to see just a small packet of cornflakes to feel safe.
• Tea Deficiency Syndrome: Denying an Earthling tea results in sudden irritability, disorientation, and prolonged melancholic soliloquies on why the universe should bother existing.
• Mostly Harmless: Classified by early researchers as simply "Harmless", later expanded after fifteen years of rigorous field research by Ford Prefect to "Mostly harmless".