The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Week of 10/28/13

Prompt: What have you learned about life from what you’re reading?
Pages Read:  97-End 

   After reading (and finishing) the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, this particular prompt, among all of the others, caught my eye.  When I saw this prompt, I smiled and even laughed a bit.  How ironic that I would find this after reading one of the funniest and best chapters of a book I have read concerning this topic.  Of course, you probably don't get why I would even notice this kind of offbeat prompt, unless you have read this book (which I advise you to, it's really great).  But I will explain why this is funny, and what I have "learned" about life from what I am reading.

  To warn you, the Earth as we know it, was a 10 million year experiment/project that was run by mice.  Yes, the ones with the beady red eyes in labs across the world, the ones cartoon ladies in the 60's would stand atop a chair and scream about.  Basically, the mice ran this operation to find out the answer (or rather question) that would tell them the meaning of our existence.  Such questions as: Why were we born?  Would it matter if I skipped work?  What is my purpose?  These questions have plagued beings (notice how I did not say humans) for their whole existence.  And we finally have an answer: 42.  What? 

  This answer was given to us millions of years ago by the second greatest computer ever to exist.  One that could give you to the answer to anything in an instant.  Anything but those previous questions, those would take a few millions of years.  So philosophers and beings alike waited for the day to come.  And it did, but we only got the answer to life: 42.  This all-powerful computer had taken millions of years to tell us that we needed to build a better computer, one that would give us the question to the answer of life.  That computer would be called Earth.  Yes, the planet we reside on.  Crazy right?  At this point, I still have really learned nothing about life.  And that's okay.   

  Earth would take 10 million years to give us the question (to the answer), and that was what everyone was waiting for, until the Vogons (an alien species) came down and destroyed the planet 5 minutes before we would be able to know the eternal question to the answer.  This has taught me (well technically nothing) that life is unfair.  Plain and simple.  Were you surprised by this ending?  I was too, but that's what makes this book so great.