Conversation:

When Arthur, Ford, Zaphod & Trillian are all sat eating and the mice are trying to steal Arthurs brain, the mice get squashed but then turn into the Magratheans...

Were the mice Magratheans in the book? I can't remember anything about that

as far as i can remember they were from a different universe or dimention...

The Mice were never Magratheans, in the book, the series or the film. They were the protrusions into our universe of the pan-dimensional beings who built Deep Thought and who then commissioned the Magratheans to build the earth.

So the two kids in the film, who ask Deep Thought the question aren't Magratheans?

No.

It made no sense to me that the most intelligent people of the race of pan-dimensional beings were children. OK, they might have been, but they would not have had the know-how to build Deep Thought. Unless they were chosen as mascots, of course, or as symbols of innocence.

What you have to remember about pan-dimensional beings is that they live in parallel universes. What you have to remember about parallel universes is that they aren't parallel and that they aren't, strictly speaking, universes either.

To arrive in one and even be certain of which end was up would be doing pretty well. To arrive there and start telling the inhabitants that they resemble the people of your minuscule home planet, and their smartest and best resemble your children, and are therefore incapable of doing any of the deep things they are doing, would probably not be a good idea.

Also you may have noticed that in 7 and a half million years the only visible difference in the "children" was their hair color, which further proves that things work rather differently in their universe.

Actually it made every sense to me that the most intelligent of the pan dimensional beings were children. I've long believed that people get stupider as they grow up, which is why I largely opted out of the entire process

Yes and no. I think that there are two questions here - what is possible and what happens generally in practice. I think that people are like plants, that while they're green, they're still growing. Once they stop learning (think they know it all / get bored with the subject and just want to have a good time / are soured by life's experiences and the baggage they've collected - then they tend to get narrow in focus and start to whither. You can see people who haven't had a new idea in decades!

"It made no sense to me that the most intelligent people of the race of pan-dimensional beings were children."

And it made sense that they were mice? The point of it is surely that they choose their own appearance- and with the fact that they weren;'t human, who's to say they were children anyway?

I agree, they weren't children. They clearly aged between asking the question and hearing the answer, yet they didn't 'grow up' at all in over 7 million years!

Unless the second time they were the ancestors of the previous two (as they are in the book).

Or clones?

Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy episode two: attack of the parallel universe inhabiting beings!

i almost forgot !

"We're watching you!... and we're following this thread very carefully!"