“The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” by Douglas Adams. Whether you’re familiar with the original radio series, the thereupon based TV-series, the series of books, or even the movie, Adams had a hand in every one of them. Sure, he was dead by the time the movie went into production, but he did write a rough plot outline for the movie, so it counts. Anyway, whichever version you’re talking about, the plot is always the same. The ending, the order of events, and other things may be different, but the basic plot still remains unchanged.
If you’re not familiar with any one of these versions, I should let you know that this blog spoils it for you, so you might want to stop reading right now.
Anyhow, the plot is as follows: our planet is destroyed, only one Earthman survives, and he’s trying to find his way through the galaxy. During his exploits, he gets a little history lesson. A long, long, long time ago, there was this race of people, who wanted to know the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. To find out, they build a computer called Deep Thought, who was to figure out the answer. But it would take some time for Deep Thought to calculate the answer. How much time it needed, I don’t quite remember. It was either a few million years, or a few billion years. Even if it was a few billion years, one billion years is still 1000 million years, so let’s say it was millions of years, just to keep it simple. In any case, those millions of years have gone by, and the people returned to Deep Thought, who was about to give them the answer. After much anticipation, after so many years of waiting and wondering, they finally get to hear the answer to life, the universe and everything, and it’s as follows: 42.
Even as I first read this, it made no sense. How can the answer to the ultimate question to life, the universe and everything possibly be 42? As Deep Thought explains it, the only reason that the answer is unclear, is because the question is unclear. So to find out what 42 means, the people have figure out what the question is.
One radio-show that lasted two seasons, one TV-series of six episodes, five books (plus an additional one by Eoin Colfer… which I haven’t read… yet), and one movie, and the characters still haven’t figured out what the question was. But, after some careful consideration, I think I might have figured it out.
Remember that they only ever told Deep Thought to answer the ultimate question, but they never really outright asked him the question. We’re being told it’s the ultimate question, which most people would think is obvious: What’s the meaning of life? Why do we exist? Is there a point to it all? Something along those lines. But again, they never actually told Deep Thought that this was the question. So all this computer could do is pick the one question that even the most powerful computer in the universe couldn’t answer. One that for this computer would be the ultimate question. Which could literally be anything. Maybe it couldn’t figure out how much is 6×7, so it tried to answer that.
This may seem odd, that the most powerful computer in the world couldn’t figure out how much 6×7 is, but maybe not. If it was so powerful, why did it need millions of years to figure out the answer? Maybe it’s because it wasn’t as powerful as its creators thought it was.
Think about it, there was a time when the most powerful computer in the world would take up an entire building. These days, you have computers that are much more powerful, that can easily fit in your pocket. Maybe Deep Thought was just powerful for its time, which to its creators’ perception would be the most powerful computer ever, but to today’s standards is no more powerful than the first generation Game Boy. Also, it’s easy to say it’s most powerful computer in the universe, when you’re unaware of others that are more powerful.
In short, maybe Deep Thought wasn’t as powerful as they thought it was. It wasn’t even powerful enough to know enough basic maths. So as far it was concerned, the ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything, was “6×7=?” Once it figured that out, it will move on to figure out how much is 7×7.
And I know what some of you are thinking. If that is really all there was to it, why didn’t anyone figure that out? Probably because the “ultimate question” was asked by philosophers, not by scientists. Scientists might have figured it out, but much like how scientists aren’t always taken seriously in real life (if they were, we wouldn’t have so many people denying climate change), the philosophers of this world probably didn’t take their scientists seriously either.
Also, if Deep Thought wasn’t so powerful, how could it come up with the idea of building a much more powerful computer that could figure it out? Who ever said Deep Thought came up with it? The characters are shown footage of this historical event, but for all we know, what they saw was merely a reconstruction of what happened, it wasn’t actual footage of the events. Maybe in real life, it wasn’t Deep Thought who came up with the idea, it was somebody else, whom history has forgotten, so they falsely attributed the idea to Deep Thought. Even the notion that the answer is nonsensical because the question was unclear might be falsely attributed to Deep Thought.
In summary, the only reason why the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything was 42, is because of a slight miscommunication. What may be the ultimate question to a living organism, may not be the ultimate question to a computer. In this case, the computer thought the ultimate question was “6×7=?”, and much like how a human can sometimes need some time to figure out the answer, it needed some time to figure out this one, which the people mistakenly took to mean that it would take some time to figure out the meaning of life. It’s all a matter of perspective.
Desmond Scheerlinck writes... 