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The Last Question by Issac Asimov [pdf]
- hacknewslogin 4y agoEven better, let Leonard Nimoy read it to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XOtx4sa9k4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XOtx4sa9k4
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y agoThat YouTube link just became my favorite of this year, thanks for sharing!!
- b3lvedere 4y agoCool! I've also found a comic version of the story: https://imgur.com/gallery/9KWrH https://imgur.com/gallery/9KWrH
- WalterGR 4y agoAlso see: The Last Question (wikipedia.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675727 313 points | by thewarpaint | 5 days ago | 156 comments
- dERtuTOR 4y agoThank you. It was an enjoyable read. In 39 years, I can't wait to get my hands on the Multivac.
- milchek 4y agoFor those who haven’t read much Asimov and enjoy short stories like this one, check out his book “The Complete Stories Volume 1.” There are some really entertaining and prescient sci-fi short stories in it.
- xNeil 4y agoThanks an absolute tonne! It's like you read my mind :)
- simonebrunozzi 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- k1ll3r 4y ago“I kiss each young woman who wants an autograph and have found, to my delight, that they tend to cooperate enthusiastically in that particular activity.” what an absolute chad. good for him.
- unraveller 4y agoDavid Foster Wallace also loved to do book tours just for dat "audience p*ssy" but you know, it's no way to live life getting everything you want as soon as it's presented to you.
- k1ll3r 4y agoIn think both of these legends / geniuses deserved all of the pussy that has presented itself in front of them. Pussy doesn’t present itself without reason, which I think we can all agree on. Takes a lot of hard work and talent to get pussy through writing. Presentation of the aforementioned pussy and subsequent utilization of said pussy is just a nice bonus. Think RSU, only much more fun.
- inkblotuniverse 4y agoI reckon the real reason people (specifically men) are angry at folks like Asimov is that they're jealous.
- b112 4y agoViewing someone's actions out of historical context is not reasonable. This stuff was happening in the 50s and 60s, and while it does seem overboard, should not be viewed through current cultural norms. Was it wrong then? Seems like, in this context, in the context of the time, it was consider crass and rude? So not good, I guess I agree.
- ww520 4y agoAsk LaMDA that question.
- raverbashing 4y ago*Isaac Asimov But alas, space fairing was much harder in practice than the sci-fi authors expected, so we surf on the web instead. On that aspect, William Gibson and Philip K Dick got it right.
- rapind 4y agoA lot (most?) of Sci-fi space fiction relies on FTL travel. That's extremely unlikely to ever happen, which is IMO a good thing, as it keeps us contained.
- causi 4y agowhich is IMO a good thing, as it keeps us contained. Disagree. The obvious alternative to human interstellar travel is human-built Von Neumann probes, which are more likely to eat the universe than human hands would've been.
- inkblotuniverse 4y agoThis general misanthropy is boring.
- adrianN 4y agoWe could be cruising along at 0.05c or so in nuclear rockets if we figured out a way to make enough profit off of space colonies to justify the expense of building them. The technology for nuclear pulse propulsion is not that difficult.
- freiherr 4y agoReally enjoyed the read, even though I believe such vision of the future is impossible. We'll just return back to the iron age with the end of fossil fuels. For similar vibes I highly recommend my favorite of such speculations into deep future - The Next Ten Billion Years By John Michael Greer [0] And some encouraging quoutes: >100 years from now >Cornucopians still insist that fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration will save us any day now, and their opponents still insist that human extinction is imminent, but most people are too busy trying to survive to listen to either group. >100 millions years from now >They are bipeds, but not even remotely human; instead, they belong to Earth’s third intelligent species. They are distantly descended from the crows of our time, though they look no more like crows than you look like the tree shrews of the middle Cretaceous [0]: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-05/the-next-ten-billion-years/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-05/the-next-ten-b...
- hansbo 4y agoReading things like this gives me chills. The idea that we as a species, and especially our lives as individuals, are such tiny specs in the timeline of the universe is obviously true but feels emotionally absurd.
- lloeki 4y ago> It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. - Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994 Full text, narrated by the man himself: https://youtu.be/wupToqz1e2g https://youtu.be/wupToqz1e2g From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. And another one, again narrated by Carl Sagan, kind of looping back to The Last Question: https://youtu.be/o9tDO3HK20Q https://youtu.be/o9tDO3HK20Q We were hunters and foragers. The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the earth, and the ocean, and the sky. The open road still softly calls. Our little terraqueous globe is the madhouse of those hundred, thousands, millions of worlds. We who can not even put our own planetary home in order weaven with rivalries and hatreds; are we to venture into space? By the time we're ready to settle even the nearest other planetary system, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us. Necessity will have changed us. We're an adaptable species It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses. More confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent. For all our failings, despite of our limitations and fallibilities we humans are capable of greatness. What new wonders, undreamt of in our time, we will have wrought in another generation? And another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century? and the next millenium? Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system and beyond will be unified by their common heritage, by the regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the universe come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of our potential once was. How perilous our infancy. How humble our beginnings. how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.
- DOsinga 4y agoNot very realistic I have to say. Who is going to take a 5 dollar bet serious in 2061?
- MerelyMortal 4y agoThey didn't specify if it was five U.S. Dollars or five New American Dollars.
- alexpetralia 4y agoPerhaps my favorite fiction story. Man's eternal quest to become God.
- timdiggerm 4y agoA classic in the genre of "Technology is so great, maybe...God is a computer?". See also: Simulation Hypothesis
- snowwrestler 4y agoI love to read old sci fi for the anachronisms. Interfacing with an advanced computer via teletype is pretty funny. But there are also cultural anachronisms. For example all the people speaking are men except for shrieking kids and a meek wife. And it is a sci fi story that ends in a Bible scene! “Golden Age” sci fi stories are great mental puzzles, but also great glimpses into the mindset of the era in which they were written. It’s fun to see what authors thought would change quickly, and what wouldn’t change. In this story, space travel and energy development advances quickly. But in 2061 there’s still only one big computer and it takes symbols and teletype to interact with it. People have everything they need, but the population keeps exploding. In short it is a good view into the U.S. of the 1950s: a time of nuclear physics, the space race, and the baby boom.
- Thorentis 4y agoFirstly, why does every story need to include a mix of genders speaking? If I wrote a story about a night out with my mates, would you complain that only men were talking? Secondly, > And it is a sci fi story that ends in a Bible scene! Did you miss the entire premise of the story?
- valeness 4y ago> If I wrote a story about a night out with my mates, would you complain that only men were talking? I don't think OP is complaining, just remarking on how it's a signal of the time. You can write a story about your mates all day long, nobody cares, don't draw this false equivalence; however, when all of society is just writing books about "their mates" and somehow women aren't present in any of these stories in any significant capacity, then I think I'd raise an eyebrow: no?
- todorus 4y ago> Firstly, why does every story need to include a mix of genders speaking? Did every Saturday morning cartoon have to end with explaining the moral of the story, and followed by a joke with the whole cast laughing? They didn't, but they sure used to. Did the old knightly tales always have to show christian values and knightly valour, through a whole lot of christian symbolism? They didn't, but they sure used to. Likewise I've started to read all the classic sci fi, and it is very noticeable, that women just want to have sex with the main character for no real reason. Because ya know, it would be nice to admit that women have sexual desires as well, and that it's especially convenient if that would mean them pleasing the protagonist that just shows up. Read one, and you don't have to complain about it, read several and you start to see it pervasive and an outlook of the times. So I look forward to the hundredth story about going out with your mates, so I can call it out in the same manner
- sergius 4y agoOn similar lines but a bit more ironic is Robert Sheckley's: To ask a Foolish Question https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33854 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33854
- apocalypstyx 4y agoThere is no single piece of science fiction I despise more than this story.
- novaleaf 4y agodo tell?
- apocalypstyx 4y agoI think the largest part of it is having grown up in fundamentalist evangelical christianity -- the rapture and all that. I view such SF as a secularized render of such conceptualizations -- along with the concepts of the singularity, etc. Much of Asimov's work does this. Many of the robot stories are simply recastings of old Jewish folk legends about golems. In one sense, I don't have a problem with recasting old fiction into a newer mold. Such is a mainstay of cultural development. However, there is a particular vain which I do find pernicious. It calls itself 'science' fiction, but is prejudicial to the concept. Such operates as a palliative to a condition that seemingly cannot be resolved: our knowledge that the universe, so far as we understand the laws of physics, the knowledge that science has given us, will come to an end. One way or another, our species is headed for extinction. For the species to choose death at a massive drug orgy this weekend is indistinguishable from the obliteration of this planet by meteor in a hundred or a thousand years is indistinguishable from the engulfment of this planet by its expanding and dying sun is indistinguishable from the heat death of the universe. Though concepts of 'souls' are bandied about in Christianity (and in all appropriated from the ancient pagan Greeks the early church fathers so admired), an examination of the actual deployment of the theology indicates that more generally the bodily nature of an eternity is fundamental. But a purely materialistic understanding of the universe cannot seemingly grant such a possibility of a bodily eternity (whether simulated or not). And if the individual can be in some way assuaged as to their lack of access to such an eternity, they are typically comforted so by the concept of the eternal continuity of the human race (or its ensuing evolutionary descendants) as a process in the universe. Rather than a palingenetism in which some 'golden age' is reborn and the true knowledge of 'god' returns, the timeline has been inverted: we do not recede from 'god' but are distant from 'god' because we are still on approach. In a way, it is the full acceptance that 'god' is crafted by Man. We will make 'god', the AI, etc, who will stand beyond the boundaries of the universe, beyond time and space.
- formerkrogemp 4y agoThis short story is always popular with computer folks.
- mbar84 4y agoI have done some typographic work for those who would like to make their own print version: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/y7ar4mtbapk9qd4/AABEe53IbANo3N_45bJA5y4Ua?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/y7ar4mtbapk9qd4/AABEe53IbANo3N_45...
- colanderman 4y agoMultivac also "starred" in my personal favorite as a software engineer, The Machine That Won The War: https://www.commonlit.org/en/texts/the-machine-that-won-the-war https://www.commonlit.org/en/texts/the-machine-that-won-the-...