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See also Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, is the Question to which the the Answer is 42.

The supercomputer Deep Thought is first assigned to find the Answer to the Ultimate Question by his pandimensional creators, after they are dissatisfied - or at least, unenlightened - by the Answer he provides for them. Having insufficient intellect to find the Question himself, Deep Thought designs an even larger supercomputer, namely Earth, to calculate the Question over the course of a ten-million-year program.

Eight million years into the program, several million outcast rejects from a humanoid race called the Golgafrinchans crash-land in primeval England. The Golgafrinchans are heavily implied to go on to supplant the existing native humans as the dominant life form on Earth. Given this, it seems entirely likely that the Ultimate Question program was completely corrupted at this point and the ultimate output of the program, whatever it would have turned out to be, would have been incorrect.

• The 'What do you get if you multiply six by nine?' question that Arthur and Ford discover near the end of Restaurant at the End of the Universe may not be the actual question. It was Ford's theory that the answer was, in fact, imprinted on Arthur's brain patterns and could be revealed by introducing a random element into the mix. This is done by Arthur pulling Scrabble tiles out of a bag. Recalling the fact that the Golgofrinchans actually replaced the original "human" inhabitants of Earth leads most readers to believe that the "Six by Nine" question is not the actual one the Earth was created to compute.
• While 6 x 9 does not equal 42, the calculation does work in base 13 mathematics (although as Douglas Adams said when this was pointed out to him, "Nobody writes jokes in base 13").

In Hitchhiker's Guide theory, no given universe can have both the question and the answer. Since this universe was supplied the answer "42" the question would be impossible to find. Furthermore, if it were found, it is assumed that the universe would immediately reconfigure itself into something even more bizarre and confusing, rendering both the question and the answer useless. There is also a theory that this has already happened.