2025/10/14

By Frank Kan

Looking back at the sinuous history of science fiction, few symbols can be a heavier stroke than the number 42. In the universe of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it is presented as "Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything." That said, the wisdom the number provides is nothing, all its fame coming from its profound and hilarious emptiness.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a 1985 comedic science fiction novel that portrays the erratic journey of Arthur Dent, an average British man who escapes the sudden destruction of Earth by hitching a ride on a spaceship.

Experiencing countless events and encountering various characters, Arthur progressively comprehends the theme of the whole book. That is, after 7.5 million years of processing, a supercomputer, Deep Thought, is built by oodles of hyper-intelligent beings to solve the ultimate question, which later solemnly reveals the answer: “42.” This baffling result frustrates its creators, who are then informed that the answer is elusive due to the equivocality of the Ultimate Question. Accordingly, a greater computer, the planet Earth, is constructed to determine the question. Unfortunately, it is demolished minutes before completing its program to make way for a hyperspace bypass, leaving the question lost forever.

The story seems to have ended here, but the real culmination is the readers’ contemplation on the number: why “42”? Fans are eager to unearth the secret behind the number that Adams intended to conceal. Speculative theories—include binary code, base-13 mathematics, or Tibetan mysticism—manifest everywhere on social media. By contrast, Douglas Adams himself explained the choice in tranquility: “It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary smallish number, and I chose that one. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden, and thought ‘42 will do.’I typed it out. End of story.” This deliberate choice of mundane obliterates all readers’ fantasies. The meaning of "42" is precisely that it has no meaning, a perfect paradox eliciting the novel’s central philosophical stance—absurdism.

French-Algerian writer Albert Camus is most famous for articulating this type of philosophy, which argues that the universe is irrational and meaningless. Moreover, absurdity arises when human desire for purpose and the silent indifference of the cosmos. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus presents a man condemned to roll a boulder up a hill forever, only for it to roll back down each time. Later, this futile task becomes a metaphor for life itself. Nevertheless, Camus concludes, one must imagine Sisyphus happy, embracing the absurdity without illusion.

Likewise, Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide fabricates a meaningless number to answer the greatest question of all time, then removes the question entirely, delivering his contemptuous attitude to the human need for grand, cosmic truths. On the other hand, the prank reveals an individual's struggles to find meaning in a meaningless world.

To be clear, the story doesn’t promote nihilism. Adams uses absurdity as a tool for liberation. If there is no inherent purpose in the world, we are free to invent our own. Without discovering the answer, the characters in the novel still can stumble, laugh, argue, and survive—they keep moving forward anyway. Arthur may be perpetually confused, but his journey goes on.

Ultimately, “42” is a satire, not a solution, exposing the absurdity of expecting a neat solution to existence and inviting us to laugh at ourselves for asking. Like all great science fiction, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reveals something profoundly human beneath its aliens and spaceships: our endless search for meaning, our frustration with ambiguity, and our enduring ability to laugh through it all.

# Maths in Sci-fi Works