[Answer to the "Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything":] Forty two.

The line is a comic punchline from Douglas Adams’s science-fiction satire The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In the story, the hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who build the supercomputer Deep Thought ask it to calculate the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. After seven and a half million years of computation, Deep Thought announces the Answer is “forty-two,” to the builders’ frustration, because they do not actually know what the Ultimate Question is. The gag sets up the later construction of an even larger computer—Earth—meant to determine the Question itself.

“Forty-two” satirizes the human desire for a single, final, authoritative explanation of existence. By giving a precise but apparently meaningless number, Adams mocks the expectation that profound metaphysical problems yield tidy, computational solutions. The joke also turns on category error: an “answer” is useless without a clearly stated question, suggesting that meaning depends on framing and interpretation rather than on raw data. More broadly, the line exemplifies Adams’s theme that the universe is indifferent to human longing for certainty, and that our attempts to impose grand narratives can be both absurd and oddly endearing.

1) “The Answer to the Great Question… of Life, the Universe and Everything… is… Forty-two.”
2) “Forty-two,” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.
3) “42.”