The answer to life the universe and everything

wikipedia

Lacking a real question, the mice decide not to go through the whole process again and decide to use, without foundation, the question «How many roads must a man travel?» from Bob Dylan’s protest song «Blowin’ in the Wind».

At the end of the radio series (and the TV series, as well as the book The Restaurant at the End of the World) Arthur Dent, having escaped the destruction of Earth, potentially contains part of the computational matrix in his brain. He attempts to discover the ultimate question by extracting it from his brainwaves, as Ford Prefect suggests, when a Scrabble-playing troglodyte spells forty-two. Arthur pulls random letters out of a bag but only gets the sentence «What is the result of multiplying six times nine?»

Six times nine is, of course, fifty-four. The «Earth computer» program should have worked correctly, but the unexpected arrival of the Golgafrinchans on prehistoric Earth caused input errors in the system-calculating (due to the garbage in, garbage out rule) the wrong answer-making Arthur’s subconscious question invalid from the start.[1]

the ultimate hitchhiker’s guidebook by douglas adams

In Douglas Adams’ amusing novel The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guidebook, the supercomputer Deep Thought gives as its answer to life, the Universe, and everything the laconic response «42». Taking this passage as a pretext, and from forty-two phrases and aphorisms that come from poetry to cinema, Mark Vernon gives us this sharp and entertaining book whose inspiration comes from the original conception of philosophy as a tool to live better and grow as people. It takes an innovative approach to the eternal questions of life, happiness and well-being, and through analogies and anecdotes, questions and quotes, applies the «love of knowledge» to the task of thriving in life.

what is the meaning of life

Perhaps the radical problem of humanity is its constant need to seek answers to every question it thinks of asking about a reality that, necessarily, is beyond its possibilities of being answered. Although without reaching postmodern relativism -or what idealists cheerfully call postmodern relativism as a method to annul any possible discussion that does not believe in absolute truths- the truth is that we know few radical truths about reality itself. Among them are, though not exclusively, that we are the third most intelligent race on Earth, that officials are unpleasant in the entire known universe, that every intelligent entity develops its own philosophical statutes to try to decide what reality itself is, and that if someone wants to do something he will do it seeking an ethical justification even if it redounds to absurdity; if some intergalactic officials want to tear down the Earth to build a hitchhiker to the deepest part of the universe, it would have been impossible to discover that this will happen until it happens de facto. Or at least this is Douglas Adams’ view of the world.

answer to life, the universe and everything

ChristiI don’t think there is a definitive answer to this in canon, but I think we can at least infer the question to which it is an answer. In the books, at the end of «Life, the universe and everything», they try to extract the question from Arthur’s subconscious using tiles from a Scrabble game he has constructed. They pull out the following question:

6×9 is, of course, 54, not 42. So it is likely that the best explanation of the universe we have for why the final answer is 42 is probably «because the fundamental question is ‘what do you get if you multiply six by seven? «Of course, we are still left with a quandary as to what sense, if any, the question and answer are» definitive «, and why that is the fundamental question as opposed to any of the other suggestions. Perhaps the point is that the question and answer are meaningless.IvanivanUnless, of course, you are doing math in base 13 for some reason. Of course, DNA has stated that he does not do base 13 math and the fact that 6×9 turns out to be represented as 42 in