THERE’S a fabulous scene in the incomparable Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy that recounts the story of the inhabitants of far distant planets, who, having destroyed their own galaxy through war waged after a misheard remark, turn their attention to planet earth: “…the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own galaxy – now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.

“For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across – which happened to be the Earth – where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.”

Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it. “It’s just life,” they say.

Problems of scale beset our universe. On Monday I arrived in the office to be greeted by a flurry of emails, into which I, together with Uncle Tom Cobley and all, had been copied, all from another department complaining that they hadn’t been consulted appropriately by members of my team. Those copied in pitched in enthusiastically and within minutes more people than there are nations at the UN held strong opinions about what went wrong, who should have been consulted and how to put it right. At one stage, I was convinced if the Third World War were to break out, it would be far more likely to start in my office than on the Korean peninsula. Ironically, like Hitchhikers, it turns out it was all a misunderstanding… In the real world, we are closer to nuclear conflict than at any time since the Cold War. Less apparent, perhaps, because Korea is on the other side of the world and because we are spectators rather than principal protagonists. But the availability of Twitter, social media and mass communications makes every twist and turn of verbal escalation immediate, apparent and inevitable. Room for miscalculation and misjudgement is frighteningly slight. Similarly, catastrophic though they doubtless are for those directly affected by them, we are much more aware of the upheaval caused by recent hurricanes on residents of the US than the devastating floods in South East Asia where more than a third of Bangladesh and Nepal and large areas of India have been flooded; thousands have lost their lives and an estimated 41 million people have been affected.

40 years on, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy continues to make me smile. Less funny is what observers from another planet might think about the dire and potentially disastrous consequences of our own lack of perspective.