The answer to the ultimate question about life, the Universe, and everything has been asserted to be 42 by the infamous Douglas Adams. But… if 42 is the answer, what’s the question? (Credit: Ben Gibson/Big Think)

Although we still don’t know the question, we know that the answer to life, the Universe, and everything is 42. Here are 5 possibilities.

Starts With A Bang!

One of the most amusing stories in all of science fiction can be found within Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where a supercomputer is tasked with uncovering “the answer.” Allegedly designed to give the answer to the ultimate question about life, the Universe, and everything, the computer spends 7.5 million years calculating what the answer would be, and finally spits it out: 42. Only, when the answer is finally revealed, no one can remember what “the ultimate question” actually was. It’s another example of being so obsessed with getting to the destination that, upon reaching it, it no longer matters if you lost sight of the whole point of the journey to begin with.

Fortunately for us, there are a number of possible candidate questions — in hindsight — that we can exploit for their potential to truly be the ultimate question, given the fact that we know the solution is truly 42. Could any of these possibilities have truly been what the supercomputer was asked about when it came to uncovering the answer to the ultimate question about life, the Universe, and everything? Although no one can be sure, even in Douglas Adams’ fictional world, here are five possible questions that rank among the most fascinating. The answer to each of them truly is 42, and perhaps you might find one of them to be truly compelling.

As photographed from an airplane, direct sunlight shining on a “wall of water droplets” produced by rain clouds can not only produce a full-circle primary rainbow, but a full-circle secondary as well, creating a circular double rainbow. A primary rainbow, created when a light source shines on water droplets, always creates a 42 degree arc, offset with respect to the light source that creates it. A secondary rainbow can be seen above it as well with a larger-angle offset. The 42 degree angle is universal to rainbows created in air by fresh water droplets. (Credit: oskarslidums/reddit, imgur)

1.) At how many degrees, offset from the Sun (or any light source), is a rainbow produced?

There are many ways to create a rainbow: from raindrops to waterfalls to garden hoses to mist to the spray from bodies of water. Yet all of them have a few things in common. They all arise from light reflecting off of water droplets. They all originate in a direction that opposes the direction of a light source. And they all — so long as they’re created from droplets of fresh water — have a peak intensity spread out in an arc-like shape, a shape…

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