Ultimate Question

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For the Answer to the Ultimate Question, see Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, is the Question to which the Answer is 42.

The supercomputer Deep Thought is first assigned to find the Answer to the Ultimate Question by his pandimensional creators. After they are dissatisfied - or at least, unenlightened - by the Answer it provides for them, Deep Thought explains that it is because they were never really quite sure of the question. Having insufficient intellect to find the Question himself, Deep Thought designs an even larger supercomputer, namely Earth, to calculate the Question over the course of a ten-million-year program. However, five minutes prior to its completion, Earth is destroyed by a race known as the Vogons to make room for an interstellar bypass, the sole survivors of the program being Arthur Dent and Tricia McMillan.

Eight million years into the program, several million outcast rejects from a humanoid race called the Golgafrinchans crash-land in primeval England. The Golgafrinchans are heavily implied to go on to supplant the existing native humans as the dominant life form on Earth. Given this, it seems entirely likely that the Ultimate Question program was completely corrupted at this point and the ultimate output of the program, whatever it would have turned out to be, would have been incorrect.

• The 'What do you get if you multiply six by nine?' question that Arthur and Ford discover near the end of Restaurant at the End of the Universe may not be the actual question. It was Ford's theory that the answer was, in fact, imprinted on Arthur's brain patterns and could be revealed by introducing a random element into the mix. This is done by Arthur pulling Scrabble tiles out of a bag. Recalling the fact that the Golgofrinchans actually replaced the original "human" inhabitants of Earth leads most readers to believe that the "Six by Nine" question is not the actual one the Earth was created to compute.
• While 6 x 9 does not equal 42 in base 10 mathematics, it does equal 42 in base 13. However Douglas Adams dismissed this possibility by stating that even he doesn't "make jokes in base thirteen"^[1]. He later affirmed that the use of 42 "was a joke",^[2] and he hadn't intended the number to have a hidden meaning.^[3][4]

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