In Douglas Adams’s popular 1979 science-fiction novel 'The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy', the supercomputer Deep Thought takes 7.5 million years to calculate that the answer to the “Great Question” of “Life, the Universe and Everything” is “42.”

A thread.

The author’s choice of the number 42 has become a fixture of geek culture, giving rise to a multitude of jokes, quips and satirical anecdotes. For example, you ask your search engine variations of the question “What is the answer to everything?” it will most likely answer “42.”

Now the question arises, why 42? If we delve a little deeper, we find that the number 42 turns up in a whole string of curious coincidences, whose significance is neither known, nor it is worth the effort to figure out, however intriguing the coincidences may seem. Let us see.

In ancient Egyptian mythology, during the judgment of souls, the dead had to declare before 42 judges that they had not committed any of the 42 sins as listed in the 'Negative Confession'.

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The marathon distance of 42.195 kilometres corresponds to the legend of how far the ancient Greek messenger Pheidippides ran between Marathon & Athens to announce victory over the Persians in 490 B.C. It is another matter that the kilometre had not yet been defined at that time!