The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Chapter 25 Summary & Analysis

Adams states that life is full of difficult questions. Millions of years ago, he explains, “a race of hyperintelligent pandimensional beings” got tired of “the constant bickering about the meaning of life.” As such, they decided to build a supercomputer to answer their questions. “The size of a small city,” this computer was named Deep Thought. When Deep Thought was finally turned on, two programmers named Lunkwill and Fook asked it if it was the most powerful computer “in all time.” Deep Thought answered by saying that it was the second most powerful—the first, it explained, had not yet been built; this computer would be Deep Thought’s predecessor. Moving on, the programmers asked Deep Thought to tell them “the Answer” to “Life, the Universe and Everything.” Deep Thought confirmed that there was indeed a “simple answer,” but told them that it would take some thinking.

Suddenly, two philosophers burst into the room where Lunkwill and Fook are talking to Deep Thought. These men are Majikthise and Vroomfondel, and they are part of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons. What they want—what they demand—is for Deep Thought to be turned off. “You just let the machines get on with the adding up,” says Majikthise, “and we’ll take care of the eternal verities, thank you very much. You want to check your legal position, you do, mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we’re straight out of a job, aren’t we?” Jumping in, Vroomfondel adds, “That’s right, we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”

Interrupting the philosophers, Deep Thought points out that its “circuits are now irrevocably committed to calculating the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything,” but that the program will take 7,500,000 years to run. “It occurs to me,” Deep Thought says, “that running a program like this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole area of philosophy in general. Everyone’s going to have their own theories about what answer I’m eventually going to come up with, and who better to capitalize on that media market than you yourselves? So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and maligning each other in the popular press, and so long as you have clever agents, you can keep yourselves on the gravy train for life.” This satisfies the philosophers, who happily turn around and leave the disappointed progammers alone.