 Later Ford and Arthur manage to extract the question as the Earth computer would have rendered it.That question turns out to be "what do you get if you multiply six by nine", and it is realised that [[Garbage in, garbage out|the program was ruined by the unexpected arrival of the Golgafrinchans]] on Earth, and so the actual Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, And Everything remains unknown.While 6 × 9 would be written as 42 in the [[List of numeral systems#Standard positional numeral systems|tridecimal numeral system]], author Douglas Adams claimed that this was mere coincidence and completely serendipitous.