The Last Question by Issac Asimov [pdf]

For 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• 4 years ago

Thanks an absolute tonne! It's like you read my mind :)

ww520• 4 years ago

Ask LaMDA that question.

raverbashing• 4 years 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.

rapind2• 4 years ago

A 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.

causi2• 4 years ago

which 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• 4 years ago

This general misanthropy is boring.

adrianN2• 4 years ago

We 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.

somewhatoff• 4 years ago

*Isaac Asimov

Maybe a subtle nod to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spell_My_Name_with_an_S ?

freiherr2• 4 years ago

Really 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-b...

hansbo• 4 years ago

Reading 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• 4 years 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

    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

    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.

willis936• 4 years ago

Why bet against optimism? If you're right you and everyone else is better off. If you're wrong it doesn't matter because you and everyone else will be dead.

Ambolia2• 4 years ago

A collapse can mean many things, not just that we will all die. It may just means that 80-90% of the population will have to work in food production.

freiherr2• 4 years ago

That bet doesn't really have any high impact on my personal life. It's just what I consider the most likely scenario. Other than that I live in a normal pragmatic way as a programmer even though I don't believe the tech I work on is going to save the world or allow us to conquer the stars or whatever.

And we're all gonna die eventually.

tristanho• 4 years ago

The very first prediction in this piece is wrong:

Business as usual continues; the human population peaks at 8.5 billion, liquid fuels production remains more or less level by the simple expedient of consuming an ever larger fraction of the world’s total energy output,

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...

But the entire piece is premised on mistaken philosophy, an irrational belief that progress has to stop for some particular (unjustified) reason.

Ambolia2• 4 years ago

Lack of cheap energy seems like a very good reason. It remains to be proven if renewables snd nuclear will really be able to replace cheap oil when pish cones to shove, and parts of the overall process aren't supported by oil indirectly.

adrianN2• 4 years ago

The iron age turned almost all trees into charcoal before we figured out how to make steel with fossil coal. But luckily today we know how to live without fossil fuels at a much higher level of comfort than the iron age.

DOsinga• 4 years ago

Not very realistic I have to say. Who is going to take a 5 dollar bet serious in 2061?

MerelyMortal• 4 years ago

They didn't specify if it was five U.S. Dollars or five New American Dollars.

alexpetralia• 4 years ago

Perhaps my favorite fiction story. Man's eternal quest to become God.

timdiggerm• 4 years ago

A classic in the genre of "Technology is so great, maybe...God is a computer?". See also: Simulation Hypothesis

snowwrestler3• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

Firstly, 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

snowwrestler3• 4 years ago

I didn’t say that every story needs to include a mix of genders speaking.

This story does have a mix, though. And it’s interesting that the characters conform to U.S. 1950s gender roles despite the plot covering enormous distances and spans of future time.

This is simply because it was written by someone in the 1950s for readers in the 1950s.

Likewise, in the U.S. in the 1950s it was broadly assumed that everyone was familiar with the language of the Christian Bible, especially King James. Whereas today’s society is less religious overall and more overtly diverse. An editor considering this story today would have to think about how many people would simply miss the reference of the last line.

wolfram74• 4 years ago

Every time I re-read the foundation series, I feel like you could take most of the characters, flip a coin to assign a gender and nothing would change.

StrictDabbler2• 4 years ago

This is true. None of Asimov's early male characters have actual gender.

Every time he tried to assign gender it was horrible. Susan Calvin as the distant, unfeeling woman who could only be a mother to a robot was one.

There was:

* the housewife who fell in love with her robot

* the mother who saved a robot instead of her biological child and was killed by her husband

* the woman who poisoned her genius husband after he created a temporary time-travel technology because she didn't believe he'd ever get the credit

* the wife who ruins her husband's chance to hook up with a real bombshell on Mars by showing up a little too early with her mother

* about five shrewish mothers who didn't trust robots around their children and were proven wrong

* "Little Miss", whose only achievement is being open-minded about her "male" robot being sentient

* Several stories about "intuitive robots" who had to be made feminine so that men would bother talking to them. I still remember the cringe-worthy line: “Listen, men respond to voices. At the most intimate moments, are they looking? It’s the voice in your ear.”

And I'm just going off the top of my head here. There's so much more.

Then Asimov took a three-decade break from fiction. When he came back every explicit woman was some kind of super-powered bimbo.

Asimov was at his best when you couldn't sense any gender. His notion of gender was deeply unsettling.

the_biot• 4 years ago

Counterpoint: the classic "The mote in God's eye", by Jerry Pournelle and David Niven. It's a great story, but the details aged so badly as to make it super difficult to read. Spaceships that run exactly like 18th century British sailing ships, with all the class differences between grunts and officers, and everybody smokes (on a spaceship!), the woman are ornaments etc etc.

snowwrestler3• 4 years ago

Yeah, that’s a good example. Niven often would have characters riding through hyperspace with aliens but also smoking and being casually chauvinistic. Like if you took all the male characters in Mad Men and drafted them into interstellar war.

Mote is actually one of the rare instances where the authors got the computer predictions right. All the characters carry hand computers that fit in their pockets, and all the rooms have big screens that can be used to display information. Not too far from how things work today.

nocoiner• 4 years ago

I love the books of Nevil Shute (not exactly sci fi - engineering fi maybe?). But the female characters in “On the Beach” could not have fewer dimensions than if they were massless points on a plane, and in one of his other books, the main character’s nickname is literally the n-word.

sergius• 4 years ago

On similar lines but a bit more ironic is Robert Sheckley's: To ask a Foolish Question

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33854

apocalypstyx4• 4 years ago

There is no single piece of science fiction I despise more than this story.

novaleaf2• 4 years ago

do tell?

apocalypstyx4• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

This short story is always popular with computer folks.

mbar84• 4 years ago

I have done some typographic work for those who would like to make their own print version:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/y7ar4mtbapk9qd4/AABEe53IbANo3N_45...

colanderman• 4 years ago

Multivac 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-...

The Last Question by Issac Asimov [pdf]

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