I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. On November 3rd, 1993, the author of the book Douglas Adams explained the reasoning behind choosing the number 42 as the answer to the ultimate questions in a Usenet discussion thread in -adams : In the original radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, which aired on BBC Radio 4 in 1978, the supercomputer Deep Thought is tasked with coming up with the the "answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything." After 7.5 million years of painstaking calculations, the computer reveals that answer to be the number 42, however, it fails to explain the meaning because it does not know "the ultimate question." As a result, the Earth is built as a second supercomputer to provide the ultimate question.
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