The Answer To Life, The Universe and Everything (42)

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About

The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is from the science fiction novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, in which the answer is the number 42.

Origin

In the novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought is tasked with coming up with the the "answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. After 7.5 million years, the computer reveals that the answer to be the number 42, but cannot explain the meaning because it does not know “the ultimate question.” As a result, the Earth is built as a second supercomputer to provide the ultimate question.

On November 3rd, 1993, Adams explained the reasoning behind choosing the number 42 as the answer to the ultimate questions in a discussion in alt.fan.douglas-adams^[2] on Usenet.

“The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ‘42 will do’ I typed it out. End of story.”

The trope database TV Tropes^[10] cites this an example of the “Godly Sidestep”, a trope in which the big questions of the universe are evaded by powerful entities in works of fiction.

Spread

On August 23rd, 2003, the Google news blog Blogoscoped^[7] published a post titled “Google Calculator Knows Answer to Life, the Universer, and Everything”, revealing an Easter egg implemented in Google search that returns “42” after searching “answer to life, the universe, and everything.” The answer engine Wolfram Alpha^[11] provide the same result for the query. On February 14th, 2004, the first Urban Dictionary^[6] definition for “The Life, The Universe, and Everything” was submitted by user Foobear, which cited The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy as the origin.

On August 11th, 2008, a comic was posted to the web comic blog Short Minds titled “Explaining Greatness” (shown below), which featured a man adding the numerical equivalents of the characters XKCD on a white board to equal “42.” The following day, xkcd forums user Battery137 posted a thread titled “xkcd=42?”, which linked to the Short Minds comic.

On January 2nd, 2009, a Yahoo Answers^[9] question “Why is the answer to everything 42?” was posted by user blue storm, which received an answer by user mmmcounts explaining its science fiction novel background. In the virtual world Second Life, a section of the world dedicated to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe is called “42nd Life.” As of May 25th, 2012, a Facebook^[5] page for “42 The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything” has accumulated over 1,300 likes.

Search Interest

External References