“And 42 is now the number of years since the publication of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the first in the series of wacky and beloved sci-fi books by Douglas Adams.”
The book opens with Earth bulldozed for a space highway after the plans sat on display somewhere nobody could reach. That joke about bureaucracy has aged better than most actual science fiction. It started as a BBC radio show in 1978. The answer was 42, and nobody remembers the question, which is still the sharpest joke about tech in the book.