#Dont panic button series#

Arthur pulls random letters from a bag, but only gets the sentence 'What do you get if you multiply six by nine?' He attempts to discover The Ultimate Question by extracting it from his brainwave patterns, as abusively suggested by Ford Prefect, when a Scrabble-playing caveman spells out 'forty two'.

#Dont panic button series#

Lacking a real question, the mice (pan-dimensional beings) decide not to go through the whole process again and instead settle for the out-of-thin-air suggestion 'How many roads must a man walk down?', a lyric from Bob Dylan's song ' Blowin' in the Wind'.Īt the end of the radio series, the television series and the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Arthur Dent, having escaped the Earth's destruction, potentially has some of the computational matrix in his brain. In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, this reason is revealed to have been a ruse: the Vogons had been hired to destroy the Earth by a consortium of psychiatrists, led by Gag Halfrunt, who feared for the loss of their careers when the Ultimate Question became known. The process is hindered after eight million years by the unexpected arrival on Earth of the Golgafrinchans, and is then ruined completely, five minutes prior to completion, when the Earth is destroyed by the Vogons to supposedly make way for a new hyperspace bypass. The computer is revealed as being the planet Earth, with its pan-dimensional creators assuming the form of white lab mice to observe its running. This new computer will incorporate living beings into the ' computational matrix' and will run for ten million years.

When asked to produce the Ultimate Question, Deep Thought says that it cannot however, it can help to design an even more powerful computer that can. Deep Thought points out that the answer seems meaningless because the beings who instructed it never knew what the question was. It takes Deep Thought 7 + 1⁄ 2 million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42. In the radio series and the first novel, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything