17 ms·
The Last Question
- pfarrell 4y agoIf you haven’t read it before, don’t read the Wikipedia summary; read the actual story. It’s easy to google and pretty short. Isaac Asimov said it was his favorite story he’d written. He imagines the entire history of the future of humanity, to the end of time, in a few pages. Really a marvelous story.
- jjice 4y agoDamn it, I wish I read this comment before I read the summary. I had chills at the end. Maybe I should read some Asimov...
- pfarrell 4y agoWe’ll maybe you might enjoy listening to Leonard Nimoy reading it: https://youtu.be/8XOtx4sa9k4 https://youtu.be/8XOtx4sa9k4
- codechicago277 4y agoSee also “The last answer” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Answer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Answer Full text: https://highexistence.com/the-last-answer-short-story/ https://highexistence.com/the-last-answer-short-story/ These 2 are my favorite Asimov stories.
- gpvos 4y agoThanks. I had read The Last Question already, but am among today's 10_000 for this story.
- gpvos 4y agoI have now read it. Interesting. The main theme is not entirely new to me; without spoiling anything, I hope I can say that the long-form, not yet finished web comic Gunnerkrigg Court[0] touches on a very similar idea as one of its main themes. [0] https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1 https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1
- moritonal 4y agoNice xkcd reference.
- ahazred8ta 4y agoFor completeness, the Xkcd "Isaac in grade school" comic: https://xkcd.com/1448/#isaac https://xkcd.com/1448/#isaac
- windowshopping 4y agoNah, this story is just exceptionally good. Asimov was a fine writer, but this story was his crowning achievement in short fiction and he knew it too. You can read his other things and none of them will give the same feeling. Nightfall is a decent story though. But yeah, The Last Question is in a league of its own. It's one of my favorite short stories ever along with The Library of Babel by Borges, The Great Automatic Grammatizator by Roald Dahl, and "Repent, Harlequin!" said the Tick-Tock Man by Harlan Ellison.
- teekert 4y agoIf you like these kind of "Mind blown", "Goose bumps" stories, read some Ted Chiang. Really stories that stick with you. I love this whole book: [0] If you like a bit longer stories, try some Greg Egan. Or, his book with short stories is also really nice: [1] [0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223380.Stories_of_Your_Life_and_Others https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223380.Stories_of_Your_L... [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156783.Axiomatic https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156783.Axiomatic
- sky-kedge0749 4y agoI want to second or third the recommendation for Ted Chiang. Basically all of Chiang's stories could go on any "best short stories" list.
- numlocked 4y agoThank you for the recommendations! I've read the Borges, but the other two were new to me and were a great way to start my day. The sibling comment also wisely recommends Ted Chiang. "Exhalation" is probably the canonical equivalent to The Last Question.
- aerovistae 4y agoYep I enjoyed Exhalation a lot. Good collection and great story.
- flir 4y agoYou probably won't get chills from anything else he wrote (except, maybe, Nightfall). But you should dip your toe in with some short stories.
- TMWNN 4y ago>If you haven’t read it before, don’t read the Wikipedia summary; read the actual story. Read it from the original publication: <https://archive.org/details/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Series_v04n05_1956-11_slpn/page/n5/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Se...>
- zw123456 4y agoOMG, I loved the original scan of this, wow, flash backs for me!!! Thank you soooo much. BTW, anyone just cruising by this post, it might be just me, but the advertisements at the very end of it are so dear. Just take a peek, so funny!
- cwillu 4y agoUse YOUR AMAZING physic (soul) powers NOW!! Why “Develop” for years??? MONEY? HEALTH? LOVE? NOTHING IS HOPELESS. Remarkable NEW APPROACH (demonstrated by Jesus) now verified by modern science. Oy vey…
- aasasd 4y agoNotably, the science fiction magazine had ads for people who are way into their middle age.
- ghaff 4y agoSomehow I don't think you'd be running the ad at the bottom of page 2 today.
- earthboundkid 4y agoIt’s an atheist’s most religious dream to think of becoming one’s own creator. It’s nonsense, of course, but it definitely blew my mind reading it as a child. What set the parameters that the ultimate computer must work within? The ultimate computer can reverse entropy, but it can’t make its own reality. There are limits to the power of knowledge.
- throwaway892238 4y agoCreator in what sense though? Evolution is slow enough that there was never one point at which we suddenly came into being. First we were energy, then we were energy forming into chemicals, then we were chemicals forming into chemicals with rigid structures, then we were chemicals with rigid structures forming more complex structures, etc, until we got to here. Each iteration creates the next iteration, constantly, always. We are always giving birth to ourselves with a teeny tiny change. There is no distinction between a human being and a gas cloud except a couple billion years of iteration. Since we are always creating ourselves, and whatever created the universe also created us, then we probably created the universe, and are the universe, and are creating it still. We are the creator and the created. It's mobius bagels all the way down.
- hoseja 4y agoWell perhaps if you become omni(scient/present/potent) enough, you can subtly influence that process to your desired goal. Evolution is very random in the end.
- shlurpy 4y agoGoedels incompleteness seems to me to disprove such omni, and if you are stuck thinking by our best models of thinking, its annoying exponential. Basically, to think about a universe enough to predict outcomes, you have to simulate it. To figure out which universe leads to a desired outcone, it seems like you would have to simulate most of the ones that do not as well. So if we presuppose the existance of a creator, maybe we are one of the failed universe thought experiments as she tries to make her intended universe?
- chasil 4y agoThere is an allusion to this in a recent YouTube video on the end of the universe, and the vanishingly small timeframe that life can exist within it as we understand. Maybe this is a comfort. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
- mmustapic 4y ago"With the death of the last star, the age of starlight comes to an end"
- captn3m0 4y agoThere's some recordings on YouTube as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojEq-tTjcc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojEq-tTjcc0
- wutbrodo 4y agoThis was the story that got me hooked on Asimov as a kid
- ghaff 4y agoWhen I put together a list of the "best" SF shorts a while back by author, this was my choice for Asimov. (IMO I can make an argument for "Nightfall" but that's a novella and other things being equal I was prioritizing shorter works.) That said, Asimov has a lot of good short stories including quite a few of his robot stories.
- werds 4y agoplease share your full list with us.
- ghaff 4y agohttps://bitmason.blogspot.com/2020/10/80-authors-80-science-fiction-stories.html https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2020/10/80-authors-80-science-... This list and the shorter prior one were also on HN at some point.
- jerf 4y agoNightfall was also a 13,000 word short story, which was turned into a novella. Many, including me, consider it much tighter. That looks to be about 3-4x the length of The Last Question, though, so I think you're still well justified.
- ghaff 4y ago13,000 words is a novelette by the Hugo definition (not novella as I wrote). And I think the expanded version is considered a novel. In any case, I agree that the original was better.
- Isamu 4y agoI remember this from a Planetarium laser light show where this was narrated and there were cool projected abstract visuals. Must have been in the 70’s. That’s entertainment!
- pnt12 4y agoThanks for the heads up: it truly is worth reading.
- hirundo 4y agoDeus ex machina is usually a literary hack but Asimov gets away with it by taking it seriously.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y agoIt's a literary hack now, but it wasn't when he wrote this
- mcphage 4y agoDeus ex Machina has been a literary hack since the ancient Greeks coined the phrase :-)
- gpvos 4y agoJust to be clear: it's Latin.
- mellavora 4y agoso you are saying the reviewers were Roman :)
- Thom2503 4y agoYes, but the Greeks coined the actual phrase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina#Origin_of_the_expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina#Origin_of_the_... "Deus ex machina is a Latin calque from Greek ἀπὸ μηχανῆς θεός (apò mēkhanês theós) 'god from the machine'. The term was coined from the conventions of ancient Greek theater, where actors who were playing gods were brought onto stage using a machine."
- gpvos 4y agoAh, thanks. Also, I don't think I ever noticed before that machine and mechanical are related words, both from Doric μαχανά / Greek μηχανή.
- 4y ago
- sprior 4y agoI saw it at the Fels Planetarium of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia apparently in 1973 when I was 8 years old and always remembered it and even kept thinking about it every once in a while.
- dmead 4y agoThe fels is probably my favorite place. The shows were never long enough.
- at_a_remove 4y agoI always thought this was kind of a response to Fredric Brown's "Answer."
- nope96 4y agoAlso check out "The Last Answer", the only work by Asimov I've read that actually terrified me. If it takes place in the same universe as "The Last Question", you could argue it has a bit of a "Roko's basilisk" flavor.
- aidenn0 4y agoI thought it, in some ways, reflected the Ellison's earlier I have no Mouth, and I Must Scream which to this day is still the story that terrified me the most.
- XorNot 4y agoI've never actually read it, just about it, and I have no desire to just because that's a nightmare I don't need. The title itself is a candidate for a single sentence horror story.
- aidenn0 4y ago> The title itself is a candidate for a single sentence horror story. I've heard that this is how the story originated; a friend of Ellison had a doll with no mouth named this and Ellison quickly thought that it would be a great title for a horror story...
- noneeeed 4y agoGlad I'm not the only one. The Wikipedia summary was enough.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- acheron 4y agoIf you've already read the story, this illustrated version is a good adaptation: https://imgur.com/gallery/9KWrH https://imgur.com/gallery/9KWrH (Read the original first though.)
- ekianjo 4y ago> "Imgur is temporarily over capacity. Please try again later." First time I see this
- cbsks 4y agoHere’s the actual short story. It’s a quick read: https://physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf https://physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf This is one of the short stories that that has stuck with me for life. Highly recommend reading it. Edit: I actually learned of the story from a HN submission years ago. It has been discussed here many times: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=the+last+question https://hn.algolia.com/?q=the+last+question
- technocratius 4y agoThere's an audio book version available on YouTube https://youtu.be/ojEq-tTjcc0 https://youtu.be/ojEq-tTjcc0
- cyounkins 4y agohttps://physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf https://physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf
- RajT88 4y agoThis has a similar flavor to Arthur C. Clarke's 9 Billion Names of God https://archive.org/details/ninebillionnames00clar https://archive.org/details/ninebillionnames00clar
- riffraff 4y agoah-ha, I came here to see if someone else had mentioned this one, it's also one of my favourites. But I would also bring up "Answer", by Frederic Brown[0], which is another take on the theme. [0] https://archive.ph/jsRx9 https://archive.ph/jsRx9
- noneeeed 4y agoLove that story. His short stories were fantastic, I read the complete collection again during the first lockdown (and Rendevous with Rama got me through my bout of covid). 9 Billion Names of God is great. I found it funny how he could predict so much about the future, except for many aspects of social change. That's not unique to him, many authors have struggled with that. I loved the image of an observatory on the far side of the moon which had a typing pool full of (obviously female) secretaries, it felt simultaneously futuristric and retro.
- zw123456 4y agoOne of my favorite things about HN, is how, every once in a while, some obscure cool thing I have not hear about before gets pointed out, which, I find cool. But then, we "hug it to death" in the HN vernacular. Which is also really cool. Some neglected corner of the web that someone cared about, suddenly, a bunch of us nerds jump on it and recognize the nerd-coolness of it. I love that. Hope this was OK to say and not too off topic. I just love that.
- ido 4y agoI remember first experiencing that in the early days of slashdot (must have been late 90s). It subjectively feels like such moments were more common back then.
- joe-collins 4y agoIt was a much smaller internet. Crowds and server overload were much more visible.
- ido 4y agoIt’s actually not the “hug of death” that I fondly remember happening more often (although that too was undoubtedly more common) but finding cool, weird, niche topics on the internet that I didn’t know before and were really fascinating.
- cgriswald 4y agoFor me, it was (and to some degree still is) finding out the things I thought were amazing… other people did too. I was very alone and kind of helpless when I read The Last Question (and The Last Answer) and lots of other things, and seeing other people appreciate these things and not just appreciate them, but appreciate them they way I appreciated them really makes me feel much more connected than I was when I was younger.
- thesuitonym 4y agoWhen you were young, more things were novel.
- paraph1n 4y agoA similarly thought-provoking short story, perhaps my favorite, is The Egg[1] by Andy Weir. [1]: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egg_(Weir_short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egg_(Weir_short_story)
- toombowoombo 4y agoThere's this really good animation on The Egg made by Kurzgesagt: https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI
- AndrewVos 4y agoWow I didn't realise that Andy Weird wrote the short story behind this! Great job by Kurzgesagt - it was really moving.
- arwhatever 4y agoHa! This whole thread made me recall that story, but I couldn’t recall the title, and figured I’d never find it by the synopsis alone which I remembered. But here you’ve posted it - thanks
- jagrsw 4y agoI read the story many years ago, but failed to grasp its meaning. It seems to be piggybacking on themes of afterlife, karma, gods, and those typically are of interest to many. But, what kind of longer-lasting idea it tries to propose, that escapes me.
- thehappypm 4y agoThat’s a shame, to me it really was a thought-provoking piece.
- paraph1n 4y agoThere's a lot of unpack from the story... For me one of the core teachings is that we all have something in common, being human. No matter what time period you lived in, no matter what family you were born into, no matter how your life proceeded: you are still human and have more in common with your neighbor than you might think. It's easy for us to get lost in our own heads, saying "I'd never be like that person". We see them as the other, but in fact they are not so different from ourselves. This seeing of people as "the other" is the source of much conflict in the world. But in this story, there is no other. There's only you. As the reader, you step into the shoes of the main character and ponder how you might feel if you were presented with such news upon your death. How would you look back on all the choices you made? How would you look back on the way you treated other people, who you've now learned are in fact yourself? How would you feel? About your life just lived? About the lives ahead? Would you find peace? Finding peace in this reality is equivalent to the acceptance of others. In pondering these questions, the separation between yourself and others begins to dissolve, offering you a glimpse into the illusory nature of the self. Plus, we don't know what the afterlife holds, or if there is one at all. So it's an interesting thought experiment also because it is an entirely plausible reality. That's just my 2 cents though.
- pmalynin 4y agoAh yes, I read this one right after having played Universal Paperclips -- which if I'm not mistaken was inspired by it.
- NKosmatos 4y agoWait, are you telling me there are people out there who don’t know Asimov and haven’t read one of his best short stories??? The Last Question, along with Nightfall and The Last Answer are generally accepted as the best.
- alach11 4y agoThey’re one of today’s lucky 10,000.
- rcarmo 4y agoDouglas Adams’s parody of Multivac gave us The Answer, so it’s nice to see this here… :)
- aae42 4y agoI prefer 42 to this madness
- robot9000 4y agoI don't get it.
- 7373737373 4y agoThis feels relevant: Roger Penrose - Why Did Our Universe Begin? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypjZF6Pdrws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypjZF6Pdrws tl;dw: It is well known that the universe expands, tracing this back in time leads to the singularity called the Big Bang. But is it possible to ask for a "before" the beginning of time? What is time? Time is what we measure with clocks. What are clocks? Something that returns to the same state (say, a pendulum, or the earth orbiting around the sun - a "year"). To be able to build a clock you need mass. Only objects with mass, moving below the speed of light, experience time. In the very far future, after all stars have burned out, the only objects remaining will be black holes. Eventually, even they will decay due to Hawking radiation. So in the end, there will be only expanding space, and radiation that "travels to infinity". Photons themselves do not experience time as they move with the speed of light. Without mass, without anything that has a notion of time, the concept of distance becomes meaningless. The universe will become spacelike. Without distances, the universe may as well be a singular point. Like the Big Bang :)
- wruza 4y agoThis brings questions. How the universe knows it’s “over”, or how the last BH knows it shouldn’t start a cycle yet? Sounds as if the universe was some database which compacts itself when a column becomes all-equal and then adds another one after seeing that there is too much E in zero/undef distance. Does that create more than one big bangs? (Since distances are undefined, nothing wrong with assuming anything from zero to just below +inf apart.) Edit: I think we should see time only as a parameter and find out how any calculation could work without it. That would relax the past tense (what “was” before time) into something manageable (no linguistic analogy yet).
- nonrandomstring 4y agoThe deification of computers seems woven in to culture in invisible ways now. Along with it comes centralisation and ultimately a fusion into a singularity. There are people, who deep in their hearts don't want individual tools to expand and improve themselves, but something new to kneel down and pray to. I place this struggle squarely on the humanist <-> anti-humanist axis.
- saalweachter 4y agoPeople just want their prayers to be answered. It's not unique to the Singularity. Another common trope is, when God doesn't answer, people turn to the Devil or Cthulhu. When medicine fails to provide a miracle, they turn to magic crystals.
- dusted 4y agoThis was the first Asimov piece I ever read. Stumbled upon it online, a simple .txt document in my browser, I read the first words, and browsed on.. Only to have them linger a few minutes, so I went back and read the entire thing and fell in love with the story and so started my adventures into science fiction reading.
- JetAlone 4y agoThe apotheosis of a machine as the restarting point of a cyclical time-loop, it must have astonished the audience especially at the time. To the best of my finite reckoning, it boils down to a pantheistic/monistic model because either the materium is eternal fundamental base reality where the [man -> machine -> god-> man] cycle plays, or there's a monad god of some sort which gave rise to the cycle, and AC/Multi-vac is a lion-snake eating its own tail, a combination of the Demiurge and Oroboros. It's potentially also Roko's Basilisk, because if the eternally looping machine knew you are aware of it, and you tried to break the time-cycle to prevent the re-creation of itself and everything (samsara?), you could end up being punished in an endless eternal while(1){existence;}. Maybe in that sense it's like the Tenma of the sixth heaven getting in the way of those seeking to break from that cycle, but I know less about this. In spite of these links to a deeply cyclical creation, life and existence, it starts the end speaking the words of a deity usually strongly held to have a through-and-through YOLO creation (miraculous resurrections notwithstanding).
- stavros 4y agoYou can find it here, it's an amazing story: https://ipfs.eternum.io/ipfs/QmSiaEmhLvFdzzvkBmJKtRDmZRNDpDt2USzy3zRbsqeYdh/ https://ipfs.eternum.io/ipfs/QmSiaEmhLvFdzzvkBmJKtRDmZRNDpDt...
- hiidrew 4y agoThanks for sharing, nice list of some others that I'm unfamiliar with. Will add to my reading list :)
- forgotpwd16 4y agoAsimov said about it that readers seem never to remember the title but they never forget the story.
- andybak 4y agoDammit. I'd conflated two stories in my head. Or imagined one entirely. There's a similar story to the The Last Question (and it's not "The Last Answer") In this story, the question was more "meaning of life" and the computer has the answer but those asking were incapable of understanding it. I seem to remember similar back and forth over time but that might be me getting mixed up between the two stories. And no - I don't think it's Douglas Adams related.
- number6 4y agoSo I asked Wolfram Alpha: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Can+entropy+be+reversed https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Can+entropy+be+reversed
- growt 4y agoIt's nice that WA actually has the right answer (reference to the story itself). I find the related queries quite funny: "how many calories does ballroom dancing burn?" Right after I had the answer to the entropy question that would have been my next one :)
- block_dagger 4y agoI read all of Asimov before age 12. Good old multivac.
- saalweachter 4y agoScifi, mysteries, and non-fiction?
- badcppdev 4y agoHe was still writing books when I was 12. Although I still regret buying the novel version of Nightfall. Short story was better
- noneeeed 4y agoThere's something about good, thoughtful sci-fi that really suits the short-story or novella form.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mormegil 4y agoA different take on this by Scott Alexander: :-) https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-deep-the-rabbit-hole-goes/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-dee...
- MaanuAir 4y agoA manga version: http://m.fanfox.net/manga/the_last_question/c000/1.html http://m.fanfox.net/manga/the_last_question/c000/1.html
- MengerSponge 4y agoimgur hosted version of the manga version: https://imgur.com/gallery/9KWrH https://imgur.com/gallery/9KWrH
- hiidrew 4y agoOne of my favorite shorts, Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu https://gizmodo.com/read-ken-lius-amazing-story-that-swept-the-hugo-nebula-5958919 https://gizmodo.com/read-ken-lius-amazing-story-that-swept-t...
- georgecmu 4y agoIronically, 'The Answer'[1] was written two years before the 'Last Question'. Equally ironically, the 'The Answer' is shorter (and in my opinion better) than the the 'Question'. (1) https://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html https://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html
- steve76 4y ago
- mdavis6890 4y agoCan anybody recommend an anthology available on Kindle that contains this story? Ideally Asimov only, but fine if it also contains stories by others. I couldn't easily find one. Thanks!
- yesenadam 4y agoLink to online text, looks like scan of original printing, with illustrations! : https://archive.org/details/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Series_v04n05_1956-11_slpn/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Se...
- yolo2122 4y agoRogan did the cliff notes best: https://youtu.be/qgf9Eqka5fw https://youtu.be/qgf9Eqka5fw
- kondor 4y agonovel read in french https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CqLY4OVz4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CqLY4OVz4Q