h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

!!!!CORRECTION!!!! My bad. Maeic wasn't actually a unit of time, it was the Mayan word for "life" (yes i went and looked it up.) But the reason he chose the number forty-two for his answer is quite simple...

sixty-eight. HA!

why even think about it, just enjoy it you analytical nerds!

I'm told this is a direct quote from Adams: The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' [sic] I typed it out. End of story.

So there you go

Did you know that human DNA vibrates 42 times a second? As does white mouse DNA. No, I'm not saying that Addams took this into consideration when he chose the number, it's just an interesting fact that no one's mentioned yet.
Also, Elvis died at the age of 42, there are 42 parts in a wonderbra and the original Oreos had 42 cookies per box.
I have also personally found that people not familiar with the Guide have a tendancy to think '42' when asked to pick a number between 1 and 100. This is useful to remember in a betting situation.

Well...errr...why did he chose 42? The answers is way too easy. It's 42!

maybe the Ultimate Answer was printed in his brain wave patterns but he was not consciously aware of it,as it was somewhere in his unconscious, and he inadvertently wrote it down (just like the caveman, who was not actually a caveman)... Says DNA to himself, "what can i put as answer to the Ultimate Question?" and pops the UA=42 atonce.. [the answer comes so fast, either because Earth is more powerful than Deep Thought, or the answer is hard-coded in Earth]

and, unfortunately, he didnt get a chance to put down on paper, the Ultimate Question too..

to be honest, is just a number, 42 is just 42.

Stonehenge is a pedestal upon which a large spacecraft may alight for maintenace purposes, such as oil changes, every 3 billion miles or so. It was built by people from other worlds for this purpose alone.

I was under the impresstion it was delightfully random, therefore catching the audience off guard and provoking the best laughter.

Oops - make that 42 billion miles!

around mars orbit?

Well, some people speculated that the answer would be 42 because its 6x9 in base 13. However, Douglas Adams replied that no one writes jokes in base 13. So I don't know if we'll ever know...

I'm not a religious person by any means but I seem to remeber counting the number of generations between Adam and Eve and Jesus Christ and, if memory serves, it turns out there were 42. I remember getting a cold sweat having counted them. I may be wrong and I appologise if I am but I thought it would be interesting to post any way.

Perhaps he visited this place. Try Google Earth at co-ordinates 53.791,-1.948 it seems the question & the answer are there.

six multiplied by seven, obviously

Oh dear; can you ever tell when a conversation is at its end? Such apt replies; more than one of them true.

I was in the pub last night, explaining to my friends why I always get a packet of peanuts for the table. Suddenly it hit me! But, I counted them and there were 47.

Ho hum.

He said in an interview repeatedly that this number was just randomly picked. He said he was just thinking about a number and then he said "42 will do it."

After some fans did not stop asking him he answered ironically, that there was a big mistake in his books and that the answer was actually 36.

probably some random number.

This was addressed in a quote of DNA in a book that I was reading quite a while back. I will try to quote that book.

Adams was trying to decide which number to use as the answer to the ultimate question. He looked out the window and mused, "Forty-two, that'll do".

i thought , the whole point was that it wasnt an answer until a question was found, millions of years wasted to get the answer to a meaningless question, now that is why mr adams was so funny!