According to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book, the answer to life, the universe and everything else is...

The story behind the answer

42. In Douglas Adams’s comic sci‑fi novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought spends seven and a half million years calculating the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything—then calmly announces “42.” The twist: no one actually knows what the Ultimate Question is.

Adams picked 42 as a deadpan joke to lampoon our desire for neat, definitive truths. It’s now a pop‑culture symbol for absurd certainty. A fun memory hook: in ASCII, 42 is the code for the asterisk (*), a wildcard meaning “everything.” Adams said that’s a coincidence, but it helps you remember—42 = everything.