Source:

Douglas Adams' speech at Digital Biota 2

Cambridge U.K., September 1998

Is there an Artificial God?

It was a great speech. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

"There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions. Curiously enough, quite a lot of these have come from sand, so let's talk about the four ages of sand."