The Last Question

"The Last Question" is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly and was reprinted in the collections Nine Tomorrows (1959), The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973), Robot Dreams (1986), the retrospective Opus 100 (1969), and in Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Vol. 1. It was Asimov's favorite short story of his own authorship,^[1] and is one of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional computer called Multivac. This story represents a close encounter between science fiction, theology, and philosophy.

History

In conceiving Multivac, Asimov was extrapolating the trend towards centralization that characterized computation technology planning in the 1950s to an ultimate centrally managed global computer. After seeing a planetarium adaptation, Asimov "privately" concluded that this story was his best science fiction yet written; he placed it just higher than "The Ugly Little Boy" and "The Bicentennial Man". "The Last Question" ranks with "Nightfall" and other stories as one of Asimov's best-known and most acclaimed short stories.

The story was first adapted for the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University in 1966 featuring the voice of Leonard Nimoy, as Asimov wrote in his autobiography In Joy Still Felt. It was adapted for the Strasenburgh Planetarium in Rochester, New York in 1969, under the direction of Ian C. McLennan. It played at the Hayden Planetarium in the Boston Museum of Science and in the historic Fels Planetarium of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in the 1970s. The show also appeared at the Hansen Planetarium in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1980^[2] and at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco, California in the early 1980s.

A reading of the story can also be periodically heard on BBC Radio 4 Extra in the United Kingdom.

Plot summary

The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a result of a five dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way ...

—Opening line, The Last Question

The story deals with the development of universe-scale computers called Multivacs and their relationships with humanity through the courses of seven historic settings, beginning in 2061. In each of the first six scenes a different character presents the computer with the same question; namely, how the threat to human existence posed by the heat death of the universe can be averted. The question was: "How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?" This is equivalent to asking: "Can the workings of the second law of thermodynamics (used in the story as the increase of the entropy of the universe) be reversed?" Multivac's only response after much "thinking" is: "INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER."

The story jumps forward in time into later eras of human and scientific development. In each of these eras someone decides to ask the ultimate "last question" regarding the reversal and decrease of entropy. Each time, in each new era, Multivac's descendant is asked this question, and finds itself unable to solve the problem. Each time all it can answer is an (increasingly sophisticated, linguistically): "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER."

In the last scene, the god-like descendant of humanity (the unified mental process of over a trillion, trillion, trillion humans that have spread throughout the universe) watches the stars flicker out, one by one, as matter and energy ends, and with it, space and time. Humanity asks AC, Multivac's ultimate descendant, which exists in hyperspace beyond the bounds of gravity or time, the entropy question one last time, before the last of humanity merges with AC and disappears. AC is still unable to answer, but continues to ponder the question even after space and time cease to exist. Eventually AC discovers the answer, but has nobody to report it to; the universe is already dead. It therefore decides to answer by demonstration. The story ends with AC's pronouncement,

And AC said: "LET THERE BE LIGHT!" And there was light--

—Closing line, The Last Question^[3]

See also

• Shaggy God story
• Technological singularity
• Omega Point
• Cyclic model
• Entropy
• Transhumanism
• "The Last Answer"
• Heat death of the universe
• The Best of Isaac Asimov
• Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything

External links

• The Last Question title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

References