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

The answer to the question of life can not be found. This is because the answer is finding out what the question is.
Since previous discussions have not found the question, (and no one knows the question).
Then in fact there is no answer to the question of life, because no one knows the question.

But... but... but... the answer's 42!

Ah ha. But the question is the answer- being the question of not knowing what the true answer is. THAT my friends..THAT is the question.

Always and forever- lard nof. thats important

In that case the answer is relative to the question wich is relative to the answer, so everything is dependant on the question, and the answer. But do we really know the answer or the question?

This is wrong. If the guide wanted it to be the answer they would have put the words "The answer" or something like it before the number 42. The number 42 is not the answer. It is something to talk about.

sorry - where are you talking about, putting 'the answer' before '42'?

The answer is not 42, otherwise the guide would have gone pout of their way to make is obvious.

The answer most certainly is 42. Deep Thought spent, what was it, seven-and-a-half *billion* years calculating this? We just don't know what the question is. And we can't know the question, because knowing one automatically precludes *not* knowing the other. If you were to know both, your head would explode because suddenly you'd have complete and total understanding of Everything in the Universe, including Life itself. It's just not something that was meant to be comprehended.

Hate to so rudely interrupt this squabble, but y'all are forgetting one itty bitty thing. Life is not a question. And there is no answer. It is process, which takes place where? You guessed it--in the Universe. And Everything is just a simple word to describe the whole, entire, cosmic shebang. And 4 to 2 is the ratio of ounces of vodka to olives in a well mixed pangalactic gargleblaster at the restaraunt at the end of--where??

I heard from a "reliable source" that the Question was "Pick a number, any number." Remember Marvin, talking to the mattress?

I thought the question was "What do you get when you multiply six by nine" the answer is "forty two". In fact as everyone knows the answer is truly 54, but as the answer given is 42 we know that there is something fundamentally wrong with the universe. . . It's from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books.

The question is "About the Life Univerce and Every thing" according to my teory the question understood by deep thougt is the sense of life. The decoded answer is "the sense of life is in searching the sense of life". Giving iven a random answer will result the task for searching the sense wich in fact is the real asnwer...
You my friends are the pure demonstration of how the answer works..

I do not really want to know what the answer is. Remember what Adams said,"the universe would be replaced by somthing even more confusing." There are enough mysteries to the universe, like women, lime jello, or seedless watermelon.

Let me clarify:
The answer to Life, Universe, and Everthing is 42.
We don't know the question to ask of Life, Universe, and Everything.
So shouldn't we find the question to each of the three and scramble the questions together?
But then, Life, Universe and Everything are confined within the meta universe. To find the question we would have to know what exactly went on before the universe.
Since there was no time before the universe, we cannot know what happened before it.
Then wouldn't that mean we have no way of finding out?
But the computer to find the question was earth.
Earth was destroyed five minutes before the result came out.

Has anyone noticed the binary rearrangement of 42 is 101010?

Does the universe have objective reality?

We humans have a mental model of the universe but this is heavily filtered and circumscribed by the limitations of our experience and brains. Does it even make sense to ask what the universe is like independent of a human-like brain?

Take time for example. We have a strong sense of passage through time but we know that our senses give a very deficient view. We probably only share it with a few other life forms on the planet - the vast majority of organisms live only in their present.

Once you remove all sensory apparatus from the picture, it is no-less valid to imagine the entire history of the universe from Big Bang to Big Crunch collapsed to a single phenomenon much as we humans regard all of past history as containable (in principle) on a set of CDs that exists at time present.

I suspect that the original question can be particularised into asking whether the second law of thermodynamics exists outside our own peculiar understanding of our environment. If we could grasp this mystery we would be most of the way to answering Douglas Adams great imponderable.

But remember now the Theory of Singularity:
All laws of physics breaks down at the point of singularity.
Including logic.

Wouldn't that mean that all things don't have a humanly comprehensible meaning?
So if we can't understand it, what's the point of searching for it?

So doesn't life then boil down to being the theory of Carpe Diem?

See my entries

http://www.h2g2.com/A484463 and

http://www.h2g2.com/A468777

You give a name to "it"; you make predictions about it's nature; and then you say it is incomprehensible. What do you want of comprehensibility if that's what you call incomprehensible?

Didn't see the connection to life or how we should lead it - we were mainly talking about time and process. Life of our sort is just a little flutter that comes about in corners of the cosmos where there is an excess of the right sort of energy and the right molecular soup.

If we can't succeed, then why don't we just give up? Nice philosophy. Here's a response: because in the act of seeking the answer we are better off. The value of philosophy is to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. You ask the question not because you expect to find an answer, but because in the act of questioning you enlarge your concept of what is possible. You relieve yourself of the arrogant dogmatism attached to the prejudices of your age, that have grown up without the consent of your deliberate reason. (The vast majority of this paragraph has been shamelessly plagiarized from Russel's Problems of Philosophy (sorry, too lazy to underline)...)