The Last Question - Isaac Asimov

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

by lisperforlife • 14 years ago

173 41 14 years ago

multivax.com

ars• 14 years ago

Previous submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=140283

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595419

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1078831

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1485286

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290590

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2467703

Some have more comments than others.

mrleinad• 14 years ago

Yeah, can't imagine how this submission made it to the front page of HN.

unimpressive• 14 years ago

Things have a tendency to resurface. I personally had not read it before. Though since the HN search is so good (Probably in the top ten I've seen so far for content search on a site.) theres not as much of an excuse for resubmission.

zeantsoi• 14 years ago

I think it's fairly understandable why - of all of Asimov's shorts - The Last Question tends to have so much gravity with HN readers. For those that haven't read the story before, I can also see why it's worth the up vote. I do find it perplexing, however, to learn how many times it has landed on the front page. This is personally the third time I've found it front page in the last 3-4 years - and I'm not a die-hard HN reader.

At any rate, given how many readers are probably new to the The Last Question, it's probably worth citing another Asimov piece that is oft-mistaken for The Last Question - The Last Answer. It's a more recent work, and a bit more obscure, but worth the read if you're into Asimov.

http://www.thrivenotes.com/the-last-answer/

scott_s• 14 years ago

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. If you are, then please consider that myself and many others feel that linking to previous submissions is a service, since it's interesting to see previous discussions.

vvnraman• 14 years ago

You can edit your post and make it recursive by adding the current link, so that the next time this story is re-posted, yours is the only post to be copied. Here is the link to this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691113

netanimus• 14 years ago

Thank you, I was just thinking to myself... this again? But I don't think it was HN before...

Like a dream all of the net is meshing together.

derefr• 14 years ago

> Can entropy ever be reversed?

I might not be understanding the science correctly, but due to the specific phrasing of the question, would "Sure--here's a schematic for an LED that converts waste heat back into photons[1]" be an acceptable answer?

[1] http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-efficiency.html (Previously discussed on HN)

nullc• 14 years ago

It uses energy to do so— just like a heat pump can heat your home with greater output than electrical input, but not no electrical input.

The more exciting detail is that computation itself doesn't increase entropy, at least not if reversible computing is use. Only errors or, rather, their correction do... So things may be more rosy than you might guess: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9908043

ToastOpt• 14 years ago

Not really; it's clear from Asimov's story that the question is about a closed system. The abstract for the paper you cited implies the led was externally heated, acting as a thermo-couple. The closed-system efficiency was still <100%.

javajosh2• 14 years ago

We need to focus on inhabiting just one other world, first. The longer-term problem of universal heat death will work itself out.

jacquesm3• 14 years ago

We need to focus on managing the one that we've got, first.

And so far we're doing a piss-poor job of it.

javajosh2• 14 years ago

I'd argue we need to do both, but that getting off-planet is actually the bigger priority: even if we run our planets poorly, we'll be safe from complete extinction, which gives us time to optimize in the long run.

CamperBob2• 14 years ago

Translation: "We need to clean up our act in this cave before we try building grass huts. Otherwise we'll just make the same mistakes out there that we're making in here."

meric• 14 years ago

I am not sure but I think you may have missed the irony in his statement.

PhilipDaineko• 14 years ago

"Man, mentally, was one. He consisted of a trillion, trillion, trillion ageless bodies, each in its place...minds of all the bodies freely melted one into the other" Seems it's going to be true. When you google for something it's already some kind of thought of Man. For now connections between individuals are very slow, but it will be solved soon. I'll have a chip in my head which will allow me to share my thoughts immediately with anybody.

CamperBob2• 14 years ago

True... and yet again, we're reminded that failing to give J. L. Borges the Nobel in literature after a lifetime spent anticipating this very phenomenon was every bit as silly as giving President Obama the Peace Prize during his first year in office.

heed• 14 years ago

I find this idea sad. I like my individuality.

abentspoon2• 14 years ago

Another favorite of mine: Learning to be Me - Greg Egan

http://qwerjk.com/force-feed#learning-to-be-me

vectorpush• 14 years ago

Thanks for this.

ableal• 14 years ago

Also, John Varley's story Overdrawn at the Memory Bank

iandanforth• 14 years ago

Why do humans have to re-submit these? If a post is 1. Timeless and 2. Popular shouldn't this be automated?

Surely this post adds to the experience of some as do many others like it. The first step in this trend would be a Hacker New reading list composed of posts that fit this profile.

Secondarily you could have a way to inject each of the posts on that list into each users front page based on if they had seen it before (followed link checking or HN logs). If I'm new to HN perhaps my front page would have these scattered throughout.

Next you could use them as content on slow news days in combination with the per user information above.

I, for one, would love it if my local movie theatre re-ran Star Wars during slow months, and I wouldn't mind being (re)exposed to classic posts on Sunday afternoons :)

kaybe• 14 years ago

Arguments have been made that it's better for all of us to see the same frontpage. I can't find them right now though. But I agree on the 'classics' page.

LiveTheDream• 14 years ago

How can entropy be reversed? http://www.multivax.com/cgi-bin/ask_multivax.pl?query=How+ca...

thret• 14 years ago

Twenty-odd years ago, a friend and I were discussing entropy with our physics teacher and my friend related this story. He couldn't remember where he had read it. I have wanted to read it ever since.

However many times classics are resubmitted, they will still find new and appreciative readers. Thank you lisperforlife & HN.

Jun8• 14 years ago

Some comments:

1) I've heard many (non-physicist) people argue/think that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is a law in the sense that, say, General Relativity or Conservation of Energy is a law. That is not true. As explained here (http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/4201/why-does-the...) the basic laws of physics are time-symmetric, i.e. there's no currently known fundamental reason that entropy behaves the way it does.

2) I've read this story 20+ times, yet each time it gets me. I think the force of the story comes not from the scientific predictions but from the poignant depiction of humanity's futile fight against oblivion. Aren't all monuments erected for this purpose? The fact that the story is very light on the tech details paradoxically increases its punch.

3) The described technology is a curious mix of far-sight and ridiculous backwardness: In describing harnessing the power of the Sun, Asimov may have had in mind something like a Dyson sphere, which Dyson described in 1960. However, the technicians still use a teletype to communicate with Multivac in 2061!

4) One thing that I think Asimov got wrong fundamentally is that researching the "final question" should have taken all of Multivac's CPU capacity. It's stupendous that Multivac just runs that question on a separate thread while doing everything else. The Hitchiker's Guide gets this right: when Arthur asks a very powerful AI (the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser) to make tea it totally paralyzes the machine.

5) I've never been able to find a good interpretation of Cosmic AC's response "NO PROBLEM IS INSOLUBLE IN ALL CONCEIVABLE CIRCUMSTANCES."

jerf• 14 years ago

As to your point 1, I would rather phrase it as a topic of ongoing research. There are some information-based theories that would have something more like entropy being in some sense the underlying law of the universe, and what we currently consider the time-symmetric "base" laws to in fact be the derived laws, in which case in some sense the entropy mystery would disappear. Entropy is a well-observed fact of the universe, and to the extent that our theories fail to explain it very well, that is most likely a problem with the theories, not our observations.

archangel_one• 14 years ago

The mix of far-sight and backwardness you describe in (3) is common to a lot of sci-fi. I remember one book of Clarke's that describes a journalist taking a trip to the colony on Mars, and to write his articles he takes a portable typewriter with him. There are a lot of anachronisms in Asimov's early Foundation novels as well, such as many characters smoking, a total lack of computers and everything still being done by humans - taxi drivers, customs officers stamping passports, etc. I guess it's a pretty hard thing to see what parts of society are going to be replaced, especially given some of the disruptive technologies like computers that have popped up mostly after these books were written.

Couldn't (4) just represent a fairly good design for Multivac so asking it one hard question doesn't lock it up for everyone else?

Arwill• 14 years ago

I consider this to be based on their idea, that scientific inventions will change humanity on large scale, like space travel, etc, and small things will not have time yet to catch up. While in reality small things change fast, and we are still missing large scale changes.

There is for example the Cyberpunk genre (starting from eighties) which predicts things much better. There are much less large scale inventions in that, and a lot of smaller, human life style changing things that were got right. Cyberpunk also started after the world took direction towards the current form of capitalism, and the utopian ideas originating from before sound strange today.

krelian• 14 years ago

I actually enjoy this mix of old and new in sci-fi, from an artistic viewpoint, that is. It gives it this little flavor that is a mix between very high technological advancement and simple nostalgia (obviously not intentional by the author, just a side effect of me reading this story in 2012). When I try to imagine a cool fictional cyberpunk future, I find it much more satisfying to picture hackers hacking away at the keyboard in front a screen filled with green text over black background than the more plausible shiny white touchscreen.

I prefer my space exploration to be done on a Nostromo than a Enterprise.

cheatercheater• 14 years ago

Funnily enough I do all my work on a teletype, using antiquated interfaces from the 70s, and secretly wish for a 40 year old keyboard to program my 30 year old programming language in.

Some anachronisms are not really anachronisms - they are just proofs of the fact that the old way was in some decisive way better.

The Last Question - Isaac Asimov

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