It might have been my 42nd birthday, or maybe it was the words “don’t panic”, which supporters of liberal causes are muttering with dwindling confidence these days, but something impelled me to reread The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And of Douglas Adams’s many acute observations, one struck me as pertinent to the Earthly turbulence from which I had hoped to escape by picking up the book in the first place.
Arthur Dent, the only human to survive the destruction of his home planet, learns about Deep Thought, a computer of mind-boggling magnitude constructed with the purpose of discovering the ultimate meaning of life, the universe and everything. After millennia of calculations, it declares a result: 42. This is bit of an anticlimax. The ultimate answer turns out to be useless without the right question, to which end an even bigger, planet-sized computer is built. At this point, my unsettled imagination decided that Adams was saying something relevant to political campaigns. So much energy is spent getting a numerical answer that teaches us how poorly we understood what was really being asked.
Simple answers – 42 as the meaning of life – are the stuff of science fiction
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