In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” the answer to the ultimate question is 42.
The supercomputer Deep Thought spends millions of years calculating the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. When it finally responds with “42,” the result is both funny and frustrating: nobody actually knows what the ultimate question was. Deep Thought explains that finding the question requires an even more powerful computer, which turns out to be Earth itself.
The joke is deliberately anti-mysterious. Douglas Adams repeatedly rejected elaborate theories that the number concealed a mathematical, religious, or scientific code. He described 42 as an ordinary, pleasingly unremarkable number. That contrast—an enormous cosmic quest producing a mundane numerical answer—is central to the series’ comic style.
The answer first appeared in the Hitchhiker’s radio series and the 1979 novel. Readers sometimes say that 42 is the answer to “the meaning of life,” but the story’s precise wording is “life, the universe, and everything.” The unresolved question is part of the joke.