42

It's Beth's birthday today and she asked me "so what is the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything?". So I explained that there were many theories, but I did have one of my own. She'd not heard me explain it before so I said I'd write it up here as it seemed like an appropriate day.

I should preface this by saying that I've been a fan of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ever since the original radio series, which roughly coincided with the time I went up to university and I came up with my explanation of what the ultimate question was back then.

So here goes.

The first thing to bear in mind is that the Earth was a massive organic computer set up to work out the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything, to which the answer was "42" and it was destroyed five minutes too early.

So at that time (the late 70s) we must have pretty much had all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together as we were about to be blown up.

Let's start with 42. We had computers in the late 70s and 42 in hexadecimal (base 16) is actually 66. But that's not what's interesting about it. 42 is the ASCII code for the letter "B" and that's the first piece of our jigsaw puzzle.

Now the predominant language on Earth by that time was english and in english the letter "B" is pronounced like the word "be".

With me so far? So actually the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is "be".

And now we're on the home run. Douglas Adams refers to Shakespeare and the infinite number of monkeys in the second episode of the first series. And what is the most famous question in a Shakespeare play, possibly the most famous question in the english language?

To be or not to be?

And Shakespeare knew it was the ultimate question as the quote goes on

That is the question

So there it is: the ultimate question is "To be or not to be?" and the answer, of course, is "be".

What other answer could there be?