Wild Mass Guessing/Other/The Ultimate Question of Life the Universe And Everything: Difference between revisions

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{{tropework}}
== The Ultimate Answer is-!!!!....... ==
* Cause, you realize we have to wait through that, do you?
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* Of course, the correct question is: "How many years can some people exist, before they're allowed to be free?" (42 years: from the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in February 1948, to the Velvet Revolution of November 1989.)
** No, people are never free. But how many Celsius degrees are necessary to start protein degradation?
* [[The Simpsons (animation)|"Do]] ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|I]]'' [[The Simpsons (animation)|know what 'rhetorical' means?!"]]
** Yes.
 
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== Pick a number, any number. ==
Canon evidence: In ''The Restaurant at the End of the Universe'', Marvin reveals that he knows the question, which he read from Arthur's brain. (He also has a brain the size of a planet, which presumably is necessary for calculating it in the first place.) Later, in ''Life, the Universe, and Everything'', he says to Zem the mattress:
{{quote| '''Marvin:''' Pick a number, any number.<br />
'''Zem:''' Er, five.<br />
'''Marvin:''' Wrong. You see? }}
* Technically that's not a question.
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== How many people actually care what the ultimate question is if the answer is something as inane as 42? ==
Exactly one and a half.
* So, does that make me the one or the half?
** [[MathematiciansMathematician's Answer|Yes]].
* You'd care if it was a password (like, maybe you say it to Saint Peter and you get to enter heaven, or you say it to the mirror and God answers all your questions about life).
* Ironically enough, it turns out it's 42.
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The true answer would, of course, be "54"; since we all know the answer is "42", this shows that the universe is inherently off-kilter.
* This question was acquired in the third book via a random draw from a bag full of Scrabble tiles - however, this would be impossible with a regulation Scrabble set (too many Ys, for one thing), meaning the result was not only influenced by the Golgafrinchams, but by a faulty set of tiles. Either that, or Arthur had made some spare tiles, due to the cavemen tossing the letter Q into privet bushes (oh wait, that one was Ford), and this troper thinks too much.
* This troper has calculated that there is, in fact, a time in which 6 x 9 does, in fact, equal 42... when you're working in Base 13.
** See above about base 13.
** To quote Mr. Adams himself "I don't write my jokes in base 13!"
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* Blue. No, Yellow!
* Depends on whether it's laden with a coconut or a holy hand grenade.
* Un-laden, it's approximately 20 &nbsp;mph.
* 42 &nbsp;mph.
 
== The answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is '''''NOT''''not'' 42. ==
Ask any magician; they'll tell you that it is, in fact, 37. At least, that's what everyone thinks when they're asked to select a two-digit number between 1 and 50, with both digits being odd, but not the same number...
* 37?! (Really hoping somebody gets the reference...)
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== Consider the following C code ==
 
{{quote| <nowiki>#</nowiki>define SIX 1+5<br />
<nowiki>#</nowiki>define NINE 8+1 }}
 
{{quote| int main()<br />
{
{<br />
printf("How much do you get if you mulitiply SIX by NINE? %i!",SIX*NINE");<br />
} }}
 
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*** See [http://xkcd.com/224/ this] xkcd.
 
== [https://web.archive.org/web/20091126140602/http://morganwick.freehostia.com/webcomic/index.php?stripnum=42 What do you get when you add together Life, The Universe, and Everything?] ==
 
== How many different universes are there? ==
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*** Or God's final message to His creation: {{spoiler|We apologize for the inconvenience. It made Marvin happy.}}
* And perhaps the penultimate answer is also 42. I have often heard the following exchange:
{{quote| Person 1: 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.<br />
Person 2: What's the question?<br />
Person 1: That is the question. }}
** So it stands to reason that the final exchange is as follows: (keeping in mind that ultimate means "final")
{{quote| Penultimate question: What's the question?<br />
Penultimate answer: 42.<br />
Ultimate question: 42?<br />
Ultimate answer: 42. }}
** Or perhaps 42 is the penultimate question, and the ultimate question is "what is the penultimate question?"
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* But...but.... I was gonna vote for [[Shadowrun|Dunkelzahn]]! And [[Metal Wolf Chaos|Michael Wilson]]! More to the point, wouldn't Cleveland counting as two people be the inverse of your point, meaning the world technically ended after the Clinton admin-[[Take That|Oh, wait...]]
** No, you're confusing "counted" and "counting." Cleveland does not count as two people in the literal sense, but people will still count him as two presidents when he was actually the ''same'' president with two ''terms.'' In other words:
{{quote| A square never has three sides, but a square and something with three sides is a triangle.}}
*** He wasn't the only president that served two terms. I think most of them did. Certainly you wouldn't count him twice because his terms weren't consecutive. While we're at it, what about [http://en.[wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rice_Atchison:David Rice Atchison|David Rice Atchison]] who may or may not have been president for a day depending on your interpretation? How about the 16 [http://en.[wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_the_Continental_Congress:President of the Continental Congress#List_of_presidentsList of presidents|Presidents of Continental Congress]]? Or the presidents of the Confederacy or the Republic of Texas? Washington was just the first after the Constitution was adopted. It seems Taft was the 42nd President of the United States. Also, this doesn't say when the universe will end, just when the United States will. If there's a revolution during the 42 President's term resulting in either there being no United States or the United States not having a President, there will only have been 42 Presidents when the world ends.
* [[Take That|Maybe this one wasn't so off after all. Well done.]]
* Well Bill Clinton was the 42nd President, and it flipped out when Bush came to power in 2001.... Oh, everyone said the world will end in 2000, with the [[Millennium Bug]], the [[Neon Genesis Evangelion|Second Impact]], etc., so did the world end during Clinton's era, and are we all in [[Everybody Is Jesus in Purgatory|Purgatory]]?
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== How many years will it take to make everyone happy? ==
It appears nobody has remembered Fenchurch. You know, the one who knew the question and how to make everyone happy? Yeah, her. I think what happened goes something like this;
{{quote| ''[Fenchurch takes a sip of coffee]''<br />
'''Fenchurch:''' Hmm... Why is everyone so sad? If only we could... Hmm...<br />
''[Fenchurch takes another sip]''<br />
'''Fenchurch:''' Maybe if we... THAT'S IT! ...But, how many years would it take? Hmm... Probably about... Forty-tw-<br />
''[Vogons destroy the Earth]'' }}
 
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42. Well, the question's been debated for a long time, and the answer would be numerical, so...
* [[Dilbert|I don't care what you say, the answer is six.]]
* [[Good Omens (Literature)|One]]. (As long as it's the gavotte.)
** Oddly, this is the 42nd theory on this page. [[Epileptic Trees|Which should mean it's the most likely to be true...]]
* Ten Thousand times Ten Thousand and Thousands of Thousands...
== [[Monty Python and Thethe Holy Grail|What is your favorite color]]? ==
42. The universe has just gotten slightly stranger for each person who read that. And may have been catapulted into a bottomless ravine.
* 42 as in... 000042? Or while we are at it, '''#'''000042?
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The Answer would make sense only if the Universe didn't contain any of this troublesome "life" that keeps doing things on its own and mucking up complex calculations by crash-landing on computer-planets and such. If there was no life, the Answer 42 would make sense, but there would be no one around to make sense of it. As it happens, life does exist, so the Answer doesn't make sense.
* One could go on to say that if you did manage to make sense of the fundamentally nonsensical Answer, then anything that made sense before would suddenly not make sense, since you've changed your mind so entirely by understanding the Answer that it cannot comprehend anything else. Thus the Universe, for you, at least, has been replaced by something infinitely more bizarre (since this is an infinite Universe and all). It's all a matter of perspective (which I'm sure is a concept mentioned in the Trilogy somewhere - the Total Perspective Vortex, for one).
* Or, possibly, it's the answer to [http://en.[wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet:Daniel Tammet|Daniel Tammet]]. Somebody, get him to model what he sees 42 as!
 
== Figuring out the question is quite difficult, but it's person-dependent. ==
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== The Answer is no longer 42. ==
Someone(possibly Fenchurch) figured out the Question-Answer pair ("What is six times seven?" "42." or some variant), and the universe changed into something much stranger. When the Universe was altered, the Answer had to change as well, because it is the Answer to the Great Question of Life, '''the Universe''', and Everything.
 
== The new answer is "fish". ==
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== What does God's final message say to a seemingly non-sentient being? ==
This is a continuation of a WMG posted in [[The HitchhikersHitchhiker's Guide to Thethe Galaxy (Franchise)/WMG|The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy]]. It states that God's final message to his creation is seen differently by every person. What would it say to something apparently with no sentience? 42.
 
== What happened to the baker when he met with the [[The Hunting of the Snark|Snark]], and how old was he at the time? ==
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== The real Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question is not 42, but... ==
{{spoiler|[http[wikipedia://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism |Ourselves.]]}}
 
== "What colour does the number 'A' feel like?" ==
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== The Question is not "What is the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe, and Everything", but "What is Douglas Adams' Ultimate Answer to his own Life, the Universe, and Everything?" ==
 
== The statement “The answer to life, the universe and everything is 42” is a [http://en.[wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompleteness_theorem:Incompleteness theorem|Gödel statement]]. ==
Think about it. It takes a while to sink in...
 
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Big Boom - Expansion - Life- Evolution - Existence - Burn out - Compression - Silence - Darkness - Spark - Big boom again.
 
What has come before will come again. 41 times has all time and space ended and 42 times has it begun. It will never stop , existence never stops. Stars burn out, time stops all fades until in time unmeasurable it begins again. 41 different Universe, 41 different different laws of reality and physics. 41 worlds of Earth, with 41 different names. Previously the we evolved from Jellyfish, a bird like being with three arms. Life NEVER ENDS. The reason for it all is existence itself. 42 times it ends and begins.. 42 times and counting.
 
== God/The Great Green Arkleseizure/Bob/Thor/Whoever put a safeguard into the minds of every sentient being in the Universe. ==
 
It's a safeguard that means that as soon as you know what the ANSWER is, your forget what the QUESTION is, and vice-versa.
* Ahh, then that still leaves room for non-sentient beings to figure it out.
 
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** HEY WAIT!!! We already have the answers! We should be looking for the questions... we got derailed somehow...
 
== Guess what Patrick Star said as an answer in a recent episode of [[SpongebobSpongeBob SquarePants]]! ==
{{spoiler|42.}}
 
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== How many answers are there for life,the universe and everything? ==
That's why the universe will be destroyed and recreated into something weirder-because of the major [[Mind Screw]] and [[Logic Bomb]] revolving around it.The question will generate a paradox,and then reality will [[Divide Byby Zero]]
 
== What do you get if you multiply six by nine in a restaurant? ==
42, which lets you deduce bistromathics; problems that seem impossible on paper can be solved when numbers dance on a waiter's bill pad -- realitypad—reality and unreality collide such that each becomes the other and anything is possible -- apossible—a phenomenon which you must have encountered, and which can at any moment impress a young girl sitting on her own (so long as she's, y'know, in a small cafe in Rickmansworth).
 
And if not for running out of Scrabble pieces, Arthur Dent would've finished spelling it out.
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== The Meaning of Life is itself, but not in the way you would think ==
Presented here [http://draconilian-dktech.blogspot.com/2011/10/meaning-of-forty-two.html\]
note there is a few paragraphs of exposition before This Troper gets to the point, its rather long.
 
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[[Category:The Ultimate Question Of Life The Universe And Everything]]
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