this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2026
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No that's 6-7. Literally: multiplying 6x9=54, but 6x7=42.
That’s the joke. The earth was blown up minutes before it could finish its calculations.
Actually, the reason the question is wrong is that in later books...
spoiler
Ford and Arthur go back in time to prehistoric Earth with the people from the Golgafrincham B Ark. They wind up killing off all the native humans so everyone from Arthur Dent's Earth, Arthur included, are descended from all those Golgafrincham hairdressers, telephone sanitizers and middle-managers.Yes I remeber that part. I always though the golgafricians died off.
Maybe that’s why the numbers were wrong.
They did, they deported all the telephone sanitisers and then they died from some infection they caught from unsanitised telephones.
No, in the novel it's the neanderthals who are dying off. Arthur is trying to teach them scrabble to help them compete with the Golgafrinchams. Not sure how that was supposed to help the neanderthals, but good on him for trying to do something. Anyway, Ford points out that it's too late to help them. By coming to Earth at all, they screwed up the program. There was no way Earth would have given the right answer even if it wasn't destroyed by the Vogons when it was.
Earth was supposed to be the greatest supercomputer ever, but some of it's critical components were ripped out and replaced with middle-managers and telephone sanitizers. Ford supposes that that's why the answer and question don't match. Others have suggested that Arthur actually pulled the right question with the scrabble tiles and the mismatch between the two actually shows there is a fundamental flaw in the universe. The reason everything is so screwy is that the universe, at the most fundamental level, just doesn't make sense.
Kids been telling us and we mocked them.
They were wise beyond their years.