The Greatest Asset
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The Greatest Asset is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. It was written as a 'sequel' to his story "2430 A.D." with the intention of refuting, rather than illustrating, the same quotation by J. B. Priestley. It was published in the January 1972 issue of Analog and reprinted in the 1975 collection Buy Jupiter and Other Stories.
On a future Earth that has established a totally controlled and balanced ecology, the Secretary-General of Ecology, Ino Adrastus, controls all the ecology with the aid of massive computers. He is visited by Lou Tansonia, a medical researcher from the moon colony, whose proposal involving setting up experimental ecologies has been rejected by the computers.
By coincidence, which turns out not to be coincidence, Adrastus is being visited by Jan Marley, a science writer. With Marley present, Adrastus is so impressed by Tansonia's enthusiasm and unsettled mind that he overrules the computers and approves Tansonia's project.
He later explains to Marley that Earth needs such unsettled minds to enable man to be man - which is more important than merely to live.
The quotation by Priestley runs:
Between midnight and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe.
| Buy Jupiter and Other Stories |
| Darwinian Pool Room | Day of the Hunters | Shah Guido G. | Button, Button | The Monkey's Finger | Everest | The Pause | Let's Not | Each an Explorer | Blank! | Does a Bee Care? | Silly Asses | Buy Jupiter | A Statue for Father | Rain, Rain, Go Away | Founding Father | Exile to Hell | Key Item | The Proper Study | 2430 A.D. | The Greatest Asset | Take a Match | Thiotimoline to the Stars | Light Verse |
