It took Deep Thought, the supercomputer 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42. Deep Thought points out that the answer seems meaningless because the beings who instructed it never actually knew what the ultimate question was in the first place. So many years of computing and the answer is some arbitrary number. How could it be??
Many theories were proposed, including that 42 is 101010 in binary code, that light refracts off water by 42 degrees to create a rainbow, that light requires 10−42 seconds to cross the diameter of a proton.
Forty-two is also a pronic number and an abundant number; its prime factorization 2 · 3 · 7 makes it the second sphenic number and also the second of the form (2 · 3 · r). As with all sphenic numbers of this form, the aliquot sum is abundant by 12. 42 is also the second sphenic number to be bracketed by twin primes; 30 is also a pronic number and also rests between two primes. 42 has a 14-member aliquot sequence 42, 54, 66, 78, 90, 144, 259, 45, 33, 15, 9, 4, 3, 1, 0 and is itself part of the aliquot sequence commencing with the first sphenic number 30. Further, 42 is the 10th member of the 3-aliquot tree. Additional properties of the number 42 include:
- It is the third primary pseudoperfect number.
- It is a Catalan number. Consequently, 42 is the number of noncrossing partitions of a set of five elements, the number of triangulations of a heptagon, the number of rooted ordered binary trees with six leaves, the number of ways in which five pairs of nested parentheses can be arranged, etc.
- It is an alternating sign matrix number, that is, the number of 4-by-4 alternating sign matrices.
Given 27 same-size cubes whose nominal values progress from 1 to 27, a 3 × 3 × 3 magic cube can be constructed such that every row, column, and corridor, and every diagonal passing through the center, is composed of 3 numbers whose sum of values is 42.
Previously, the designers of the computers had given up, and settled for the question "How many roads must a man walk down?". However, the complex biological computer program (also known as "the Earth") which had been calculating the question for millions of years got screwed up when the Golgafrinchans arrived on prehistoric Earth and destroyed the environment.
So yes, the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything else is 42, because humans have been using the wrong base system for mathematics. That is why mice are the smartest creatures on the planet. If you use base 13 and multiply 6 by 9 you will get the answer 42, which after all is the true base of mathematics in the Universe and used by all intelligent lifeforms, which excludes humans by definition.
