# Quote — Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

> [On how human activity on the Yangtze river affects the Baiji:] “I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be a blind man trying to live in a discotheque. Or several competing discotheques.”
>
> “Well, it’s worse than that, isn’t it?” Mark said. “Dolphins rely on sound to see with.”
>
> “All right, so it would be like a deaf man living in a discotheque.”
>
> “Why?”
>
> “All the stroboscopic lights and flares and mirrors and lasers and things. Constantly confusing information. After a day or two you’d be completely bewildered and disoriented and start to fall over the furniture.”
>
> “Well, that’s exactly what’s happening, in fact. The dolphins are continually being hit by boats or mangled in their propellers or tangled in fishermen’s nets. A dolphin’s echolocation is usually good enough for it to find a small ring on the sea bed, so things must be pretty serious if it can’t tell that it’s about to be brained by a boat. Then, of course, there’s all the sewage, the chemical and industrial waste and artificial fertiliser that’s being washed into the Yangtze, poisoning the water and poisoning the fish.”
>
> “So,” I said, “what do you do if you are either half-blind, or half-deaf, living in a discotheque with a stroboscopic light show, where the sewers are overflowing, the ceiling and the fans keep crashing on your head and the food is bad?”
>
> “I think I’d complain to the management.”
>
> “They can’t.”
>
> “No. They have to wait for the management to notice.”

- Author: [Douglas Adams](https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams.md)
- Book: [Last Chance to See](https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/last-chance-to-see.md)
- Page: 156
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Last_Chance_to_See#Chapter_5:_Blind_Panic) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/last-chance-to-see/on-how-human

## More from this book

> Until 1987 Fiordland was the home of one of the strangest, most unearthly sounds in the world. For thousands of years, in the right season, the sound could be heard after nightfall throughout these wild peaks and valleys.
>
> It was like a heartbeat: a deep, powerful throb that echoed through the dark ravines. It was so deep that some people will tell you that they felt it stirring in their gut before they could discern the actual sound, a sort of wump, a heavy wobble of air. Most people have never heard it at all, or ever will again. It was the sound of the kakapo, the old night parrot of New Zealand, sitting high on a rocky promontory and calling for a mate.

p. 111 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/last-chance-to-see/until-1987-fiordland.md)

> [On the kakapo’s tendency to freeze in confusion when faced with a predator:] It’s frustrating to think of the difference that language would make. The millennia crawl by pretty bloody slowly while natural selection sifts its way through generation after generation, favouring the odd aberrant kakapo, which is a little twitchier than its contemporaries, till the species as a whole finally gets the idea. It would all be cut short in a moment if one of them could say, “When you see one of those things with whiskers and little bitey teeth, run like hell.” On the other hand, human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

p. 116 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/last-chance-to-see/on-the-kakapos.md)

> I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

p. 38 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/last-chance-to-see/i-have-a-well-deserved.md)