1901-42

The Answer to The Ultimate Question Of Life, the Universe and Everything is a fictional solution in Douglas Adams's science fiction series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. more...

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In the story, the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is sought using the hypercomputer Deep Thought, however the computer was insufficiently powerful to provide the Ultimate Question when asked after it had produced the Answer (after a very long computation time — 7.5 million years). The answer given by Deep Thought prompted the protagonists to embark on a quest to discover the Question to which this is the Answer.

The search for the Ultimate Answer

According to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, researchers from a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings constructed the second greatest computer in all of time and space, Deep Thought, to calculate the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. After seven and a half million years of pondering the question, Deep Thought provides the answer: "forty-two." The reaction:

"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"

"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."

The search for the Ultimate Question

Deep Thought informs the researchers that it would design a second and greater computer, incorporating living beings as part of its computational matrix, to tell them what the question is. That computer was called Earth and was so big that it was often mistaken for a planet. The researchers themselves took the apparent form of mice to run the program. The question was lost, five minutes before it was to have been produced, due to the Vogons' demolition of the Earth, supposedly to build a hyperspace bypass. Later in the series, it is revealed that the Vogons had been hired to destroy the Earth by a consortium of philosophers and psychiatrists who feared for the loss of their jobs when the meaning of life became common knowledge.

Lacking a real question, the mice proposed to use "How many roads must a man walk down?" (the first line of Bob Dylan's famous protest song "Blowin' In The Wind") as the question for talk shows, after considering and rejecting various other questions such as, "What's yellow and dangerous?" (a commonplace joke, the answer to which is usually "shark-infested custard").

At the end of Mostly Harmless, which is the last of the series of novels, there is a final reference to the number 42. As Arthur and Ford are dropped off at club Beta (owned by Stavro Müller), Ford shouts at the cabby to stop "just there, number forty-two … Right here!" The entire Earth (in all dimensions, not just those in which it was demolished by the Vogons), is destroyed immediately after this final reference, which could lead to the Ultimate Question being, "Where does it all end?"

Read more at Wikipedia.org