Archive for January, 2007

On b5′s forums, one of our bloggers asked what the meaning of life was. I said it was, quite obviously, 42. Aaron, our Tech Manager, retorted that I was wrong. That 42 was the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Hence, life’s meaning was 42/3. Or 14.

My response is below:

No, see, that would assume that life, the universe and everything had equal values. However it’s obvious that “everything” would include the universe (and may or may not include “life”, as “life” is fairly ambiguous in that it could mean life in general (which would be included in “everything”) or the value of YOUR life (which wouldn’t, as it’s a subjective value)).

Which means life is either a subset of the value of everything (ie: 42=everything(x+universe+life)) or completely separate (ie: 42=everything + universe + life).

Unless, of course, Adams meant “life, the universe and everything else that isn’t included”. My guess ishe meant “life as an objective stance” (as in Ingrid’s “what’s the meaning of life”, as opposed to “what’s the meaning of MY life”. Likewise, my guess is he meant everything as a separate entity to “life” and “the universe”. In fact, my guess is he meant “the magic of life”, “the magic of the universe” and “the magic of everything else that’s cool about everything else”.

In which case, the formula is certainly 42=life + universe + everything. However, even having deduced that (though the deduction could be wrong), it’s hard to imagine that 3 incredibly valuable things would all have the same core values in the answer of 42.

My supposition is that “the universe” is simply a function of “stuff” existing (ie: molecules collide and cool things happen). However “the universe” doesn’t necessarily result in “life”. So “life” is inherently more valuable than “the universe”. Not so much more valuable that it overshadows it – after all, life wouldn’t exist without the universe. But certainly of greater value.

How valuable, for example, is Wayne Gretsky’s father (had house with pond, taught Wayne to play, encouraged him daily, etc) to the value that is Wayne Gretsky. I’d argue that a talent like Gretsky is 10% genes, 15% upbringing, 40% perseverance, 30% training and 5% pure dumb luck. As a result, his father likely accounts for half his genes, half his upbringing and probably 10% of his training (since he was so involved early). Which really means Wayne’s father is worth at least 22.5% of Wayne Gretsky.

Wayne’s father would exist without Wayne, but Wayne wouldn’t exist without his father.

If we take the same figures and apply them to the formula, we might be getting somewhere.

In terms of “everything else that’s cool”, my guess is that that is a by-product (in a similar way to Wayne and his father) of both the universe and life.

So, in the tree of value, we have “everything”, which is 11.25% more valuable than both life and the universe, and life, which is 22.5% more valuable than just the universe.

Which means life is worth roughly 10.9466, the universe 8.936 and everything 22.119.

Even then, truth be told, that doesn’t tell us the meaning of life. Just the value of it.

So, I guess I was wrong in that I didn’t actually answer Ingrid’s question ;-)

On further reflection, I realized Adams had said 14 was the MEANING of life, the universe and everything. Hence, the meaning of life is, obviously, 10.9466, give or take a millenia or two.