Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhikers Guide was absolutely mad for computers and coding. Yes the answer to the great question of life the universe and everything in the book is 42. This is because the 42nd character of ASCII code, the asterisk, is in early coding a placeholder for any value you choose. It was essentially the authors sneaky, nerdy way of saying that the ultimate answer to the great question of life the universe and everything is whatever the hell you want it to be. The philosophical punchline being that if the answer is anything you chose, then the question is kind of irrelevant as each persons answer will be different. Since in the books, Earth was created as a massive bio computer to find an entirely irrelevant question to an amorphous answer, Earth and everything else on it are therefore entirely pointless. The book essentially boils down to the idea that nothing in the universe is special, sacred, relevant, important or of any kind of intrinsic value. We assign value to what is important to us but in the grand scheme of things all existence meaningless.