Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

https://hex.ooo/library/last_question.html

by ColinWright • 3 months ago

792 305 3 months ago

jasongill• 3 months ago

This is one of those stories, just like the SR-71 "ground speed check" story, that every single time I see it posted I just have to read the entire thing again. I love it.

markus_zhang2• 3 months ago

How about this one?

https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue4-8.h...

b3lvedere• 3 months ago

That was an awesome read. Thanks.

ggerules• 3 months ago

Yes! Thanks for posting! This gives the feel of what my career looked like in the 80s and early 90s.

jihadjihad• 3 months ago

Agreed. Don't forget the "Can't send emails farther than 500 miles" one, too [0]:

0: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

rationalist6• 3 months ago

More Magic:

https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html

rouvax• 3 months ago

For more reading, see also: https://web.archive.org/web/20250719141310/https://dbrgn.ch/...

I'm a bit proud of having suggested the author to add the 2019 entry (thanks to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678).

Hopefully there's another repo of Internet stories somewhere else?

xeonmc2• 3 months ago

Not quite tech or sci-fi, but for me it’s https://www.eternal-flame.org/library/oldlibrary/georgebusin...

riffraff3• 3 months ago

also the story of Mel

https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

robinpie• 3 months ago

The network electrically incompatible with Excel:

https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9si6r9/postmortem...

rationalist6• 3 months ago

Once I discovered that the SR-71 Ground Speed Check is most likely not true, it doesn't hold the same weight for me anymore.

Way too many unlikely variables all lining up, and no other accounts of the story from all of the people (pilots, air traffic controller, etc) supposedly on the frequency.

actionfromafar• 3 months ago

Don't tell me the "dreaded 7-engine approach" also isn't true!

sebg2• 3 months ago

For those curious -> https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blac...

PaulHoule2• 3 months ago

You better watch out. When my evil twin feels y'all aren't upvoting my posts enough he thinks "let's do a search for articles that have gotten 200+ votes at least 5 times in different years" [1] It's a highly effective strategy that I know dang doesn't like!

So I'll post another article about robot grippers which you should upvote instead of the breathless "AI will give us more Nobel Prize winning research" posts because: (1) robots that can change bedpans and pick strawberries really will change the world, and (2) they give out a certain number of Nobel Prizes a year and AI won't change that.

[1] old issues of Byte magazine are a good bet: try https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1986-05

gwerbin5• 3 months ago

As usual, labor saving is only a good idea if the wealth created is distributed throughout society, not redirected to a small group of people.

qingcharles• 3 months ago

Somebody listened to your TED Talk:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806096 :)

CGMthrowaway3• 3 months ago

People will be reading this story for ten trillion years

Toutouxc2• 3 months ago

For me it's "The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans", which is often quite problematic.

derwiki• 3 months ago

I loved reading that. Why is it problematic?

JumpCrisscross• 3 months ago

The Gentle Seduction [1], too.

[1] https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Stiegler_GentleSeduction.pdf

zem3• 3 months ago

hadn't read that one before! thanks for sharing it

dogmatism• 3 months ago

If we're just doing fun apocrypha my favorite is the one about the USS Constitution and alcohol consumption

charv• 3 months ago

All time great short story. Has shaped my world view since I first read it many years ago.

Aliyekta• 3 months ago

Claude Mythos

ramon156• 3 months ago

[reference] [reference]

moffers• 3 months ago

My favorite short story of all time. Between this and Deep Thought in HHGttG, I couldn’t believe the prescience when the bitter lesson was learned and LLMs and GPUs started eating the world.

baq2• 3 months ago

It only takes understanding the exponential function and some imagination, right? Apparently an uncommon combination of traits in people ;)

shivaniShimpi_3• 3 months ago

the LLM parallel does hit different on this read multivac says insufficient data across ten trillion years and the whole story is basically if more compute and more data eventually gets you there. what's weird is the story answers yes, not on any timeframe that helps the people asking tho.

feels uncomfortably close to the actual situation where the models keep getting better and the answer keeps being "not yet, ask again later" while the answer is getting ready years late

mercer• 3 months ago

maybe 42 was just the end of sequence token...

waltbosz2• 3 months ago

I feel like the software running multivac represents something vastly more advanced than today's LLM.

I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor to his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the same story.

sebg2• 3 months ago

Lots of good comments over the years -> https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%09Isaac+Asimov%3A+The+Last+Questi...

bitshiftfaced• 3 months ago

For a while I thought I really liked sci fi novels and short stories, and maybe that's somewhat true. But I've started wondering if maybe I just liked Asimov's writing in particular. Other writers in the genre are more hit or miss. Can anyone recommend other writers that are on his level?

boxed• 3 months ago

I mean.. a genre can't be all hits, that makes no sense :P

If you want good sci-fi a good list can be:

- Ender's Game

- The Martian + Project Hail Mary

- A Fire Upon the Deep

- Dune

baq2• 3 months ago

- Hyperion

rationalist6• 3 months ago

The Expanse series starting with Leviathan Wakes.

(I second Ender's Game, The Martian, and Project Hail Mary.)

comicjk• 3 months ago

A Fire Upon The Deep is a fantastic novel for programmers to read, and I think the prequel A Deepness In The Sky is even better. There are some amazing old-school coding jokes in there, like that everyone thinks the universal time counter started at the first moon landing, but programmer archaeologists know it was really 15 megaseconds later.

xeonmc2• 3 months ago

Though Dune is highly acclaimed for its concepts, I couldn’t quite get into it personally.

They’re just too dry for my tastes.

mwigdahl• 3 months ago

Neal Stephenson's work is outstanding in my opinion, although some find it polarizing. My favorite of his is _Anathem_, followed closely by _Seveneves_.

Iain Banks's science fiction novels (mostly set in the Culture, but he does have others) are also great.

jakeinspace• 3 months ago

Stanislaw Lem, if you can handle something a little more poetic and less strictly hard sci-fi.

NickDouglas• 3 months ago

Try "The Illustrated Man" by Ray Bradbury, but skip the terrible frame story. The actual short stories are beautiful literature and canonical sci-fi.

NetMageSCW4• 3 months ago

As someone who loves the Big Three (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein) and have read a lot of SF, I pretty much despise Bradbury. There’s no science in his science fiction.

shivaniShimpi_3• 3 months ago

ted chiang if you haven't already. story of your life, exhalation, the lifecycle of software objects. same thing asimov does where the sci fi premise is really just a frame for a very human question. except chiang does it in like 30 pages and you feel it for a week

Arainach• 3 months ago

Ted Chiang is the greatest living science fiction short story writer I'm aware of, and ranks highly on my all time list.

Darkphibre• 3 months ago

His short story "Understand" is just... amazing.

It wasn't until I discovered I was on the spectrum that I realized why it clicked so much. >.< I'm masking all the time, running conversational simulations to anticipate the societally-expected response to any given situation (and am high on the IQ spectrum).

https://web.archive.org/web/20140527121332/http://www.infini...

jperoutek• 3 months ago

I second this. Exhalation for some reason really resonates with me.

riffraff3• 3 months ago

I have only read a few stories by Ted Chiang, but I concur, they were all fantastic.

jcul• 3 months ago

Story of your life is one of my favorite short stories.

npilk• 3 months ago

It's not "sci fi" but you should read Borges' short stories, particularly from Ficciones.

You may have already read his story The Library of Babel: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...

phkahler• 3 months ago

> But I've started wondering if maybe I just liked Asimov's writing in particular.

A less commonly mentioned Asimov book that I really enjoyed and will read again is "The End of Eternity". If you've not read it, the ending is IMHO amazing and unique.

Last Question reminds me of it because of the style.

sjg1729• 3 months ago

I was also quite fond of Palimpsest by Stross. It’s a retelling of EoE but a more modern treatment (and the writing is quite a bit better, IMO)

globular-toast3• 3 months ago

Also worth reading, although a very different style is The Gods Themselves. Although, to be honest, I'm not sure there's a single Asimov book I haven't enjoyed and I've read almost all of them.

robrain2• 3 months ago

Becky Chambers - Wayfarer series and several enjoyable short stories/novellas. Low on blasters, high on sentient life in all its many forms.

robrain2• 3 months ago

I know you can’t comment on modding - but seriously, someone voted me down because they don’t like a literary suggestion? Tough crowd.

NetMageSCW4• 3 months ago

Have you tried Arthur Clarke? I would say he is close to Asimov in many ways, being from the same time.

For others who share some similarities, though with a greater emphasis on character and adventure, perhaps Hal Clement, Larry Niven or Robert L. Forward.

Esn024• 3 months ago

I think Brian Daley's books have a somewhat similar feel as Asimov's, particularly "Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds" and its sequels.

I also find C.J.Cherryh's books to be often quite interesting.

Asimov really did have a knack for clear, deceptively simple writing that isn't all that common.

riffraff3• 3 months ago

perhaps Fredric Brown? He and Asimov were in my primary school reading anthology, and I will never thank enough the people who put the book together.

Also, I am not sure he's translated in English, but Sessanta Racconti[0] by Dino Buzzati is high on my list of fantastic short stories (not sci-fi, just.. I don't know).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sessanta_racconti

redsocksfan45• 3 months ago

Alfred Bester; The Stars My Destination, and The Demolished Man.

globular-toast3• 3 months ago

Depends what you consider on his level really. Some find the writing too dry, but maybe you like that? Have you read Dune? What about The Forever War? They are different styles but definitely enjoyed by someone who also likes Asimov.

I didn't get on with Neuromancer or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? at all, though. Suspect you wouldn't either.

I also find stuff like Andy Weir way too literal, like you're basically reading a film script. Asimov leaves a lot more room for imagination.

jzemeocala• 3 months ago

Rudy Rucker is amazing

eschulz• 3 months ago

I love this story. When I first read it online in college many years ago I was surprised, and disappointed, when I suddenly realized it was a short story. It's a great one to recommend to people.

jjoonathan3• 3 months ago

Outer Wilds, the video game, does a brilliant job expanding on this theme if you're hungry for more. "There's more to explore here."

Warning: progression is gated behind knowledge so spoilers are worse than usual and The Algorithm will aggressively try to spoil you if you start poking too deep into "outer wilds" searches. If you like The Last Question and can fit a game in your life, Outer Wilds is a solid bet.

larrykluger• 3 months ago

A classic. It was dramatized by the Rochester NY, USA Museum of Science as a planetarium show, and I saw it there about 1974 with my father. Great times.

quentindanjou• 3 months ago

I wasn't expecting to find my favorite short-story on HN today! That's a pleasant surprise! This is how I started my journey in reading Isaac Asimov, I really recommend it!

zabzonk• 3 months ago

0xmattf• 3 months ago

One of my all-time favorites. Almost every time I'm involved in a conversation about books, I always mention this. It amazes me how many people have never heard of it.

grimgrin• 3 months ago

okay so i'll be the sole commenter of: hex.ooo is an incredible domain name to me, maybe because i dig its UI, but certainly just in general

didn't know about ooo, maybe because it's not available on namecheap!

criddell• 3 months ago

It's an awesome name.

If you go up one level, you can see this story is one entry in a great library of stuff:

https://hex.ooo/library/

CGMthrowaway3• 3 months ago

INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER

Boy, it sure would be nice if real LLMs were capable of giving an answer like that.

bargainbin• 3 months ago

You’re absolutely right! I do have insufficient data for a meaningful answer. This is not an *insightful prediction* — it’s *Dunning-Kruger masquerading as qualified intelligence*

croisillon2• 3 months ago

No Information before. No information after. This is not a failure — it's narcissism as a service.

fragmede2• 3 months ago

Did a human write this?

gwerbin5• 3 months ago

They can do it, it's just not "by default", they need to be prompted to do it. So at least the danger is manageable if you know what you're doing and how to prompt around it.

Bridged7756• 3 months ago

Not really. They're still non deterministic language predictors. Believing that a prompt is an effective way to actually control these machines' actual behavior is really far fetched.

They com like that from factory. Hardcoded to never say no.

saghm• 3 months ago

"Just don't accidentally forget to do the thing that makes it safe" is not a very effective strategy for something that so many vested interests are trying to push into all corners of society. If it's so easy to misuse it, then it shouldn't be used in any context outside of where there are no major consequences for bad output and there's amble opportunity and ability to validate it

narginal• 3 months ago

2061, mark the date

ryanjshaw• 3 months ago

I reckon that’s how we know we’ve hit ASI.

cortesoft• 3 months ago

There are a lot of humans who refuse to give that answer, too

Forgeties794• 3 months ago

I don’t have to spend dozens if not hundreds of dollars a month to talk to most people in my life lol

Tallain• 3 months ago

This continues to be the most tiring response to any criticism of LLM output. It's pretty much guaranteed to show up at this point. I guess with similar enough input tokens, we're guaranteed the same output...

otikik• 3 months ago

Just add a skill to Claude

temp08262• 3 months ago

Living in South America a bit really showed me this. I think it's a cultural thing here but someone will always give you an answer, even if it's wrong, confidently. It was hard for me at first- I am usually the first person to say "I don't know" (often followed by "but let's slow down and find a good solution").

jfaulken• 3 months ago

This was similar to my experience running a software team in India (I'm an American) a couple decades ago. I had to learn not to ask yes/no questions because the answer would always be yes.

throwaway132448• 3 months ago

Talking about South America as a homogeneous unit is… weird. Even neighbouring countries speaking the same language can be entirely different in this regard.

andriy_koval• 3 months ago

someone will always give you an answer, even if it's wrong, confidently

its common playbook for corporate self-development in NA.

lm411• 3 months ago

I've experienced similar with some Southeast Asian cultures as well.

I'm a patient person, but it can be frustrating to have to endure 10 minutes of verbal diarrhea that eventually results in a "no" or "I don't know".

analog8374• 3 months ago

Is South America populated by LLMs?

But I kid, I have a friend who's the same way. He's an Austrian who grew up in Chicago and was in the army.

I have considered the phenomenon. I somewhat disapprove but I can also see the advantage of always presenting a confident face

amdivia• 3 months ago

Exactly!!

I've been trying to work on a new LLM code editor that does just that. When you instruct it to do something, it will evaluate your request, try to analyze the action part of it, the object, subject, etc, and map them to existing symbols in your codebase or, to expected to be created symbols. If all maps, it proceeds. If the map is incomplete, it errors out stating that your statement contained unresolvable ambiguity

I think there is a real benefit here, and it might be the actual next beneficial grounded AI sustainable use in programming. Since I the current "Claude code and friends" are but a state of drunkenness we fell into after the advent of this new technology, but it will prove, with time, that this is not a sustainable approach

in-silico• 3 months ago

As measured by #_no_answer/(#_incorrect + #_no_answer) the top current models can do it 60-70% of the time (Grok 4.20 is the best with 83%): https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience

qsera• 3 months ago

I just came from reddit and seeing this comment, looked for "controversial" sort option instinctively.

Maybe hackernews is becoming reddit...

lynndotpy• 3 months ago

At the time of this writing, the prevailing thinking with "artificial intelligence" was that we'd encode every Fact we know and every rule of Logic, and from there, the computer would make new discoveries. Todays AI researchers would call this "symbolic" AI, compared to the "neural" AI powering LLMs. They're like two different worlds.

LLMs are just generating text, they don't know anything. They can't assess whether there is enough data for an answer. When you add a follow up prompt "This is wrong, why did you lie?" only then is it able to generate text, "I was wrong, I'm sorry," and so forth.

theturtletalks• 3 months ago

Did Asimov’s idea of AI revolve around data retrieval? I’ve read that even human intelligence isn’t necessarily remembering things, but being able to traverse our knowledge and find that idea or thought quickly.

lern_too_spel• 3 months ago

They can read context and with fairly high accuracy say whether that context contains enough information to answer a posed question. They cannot (and we cannot for them) introspect their own weights to say whether their weights already encode information sufficient to answer a posed question.

ButlerianJihad• 3 months ago

This is exactly like a lot of customer service, or technical support.

It seems that they are loath to tell anyone “no”, or that something can’t be done, or that an app doesn’t have a feature or can’t be used in a certain way. Especially when a feature has been removed for security reasons.

In fact, it gets so crazy that I simply cannot get a straight answer out of somebody and if I persist in my line of questioning and they become evasive or vague or I just can’t get a straight answer for long enough, ultimately, I suspect that the answer is “no”, and that they're simply not allowed to tell me, and they're paid and trained specifically to avoid uttering the “n-word”.

In my first job, as a network operator, my supervisor admonished me, and said “we must never tell a customer that we don't know something”. He said that we should tell the customer that “I will go ahead and find out for you, and get back to you on that”.

And that is kind of the kind of slippery non-answer I often received in my most recent job, that some manager or supervisor would “look into something” for me and “get back to me”. But the ‘getting back to me’ part never happened, and I began to suspect that it was a platitude meant to satisfy me enough that I would shut up for a while, and stop pressing the issue.

ItsClo688• 3 months ago

hahaha, the irony is that "INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER" requires more intelligence than a confident wrong answer. you have to know what you don't know. current LLMs are optimized to always produce output, which means they've essentially been trained out of epistemic humility.

Asimov's Multivac at least had the dignity to wait.

antonvs• 3 months ago

Yes but it waited until the end of the universe. Its annual KPI and OKR performance was abysmal.

Procrastes• 3 months ago

I remember the first time I heard this story. I was maybe 7 at a planetarium and they animated it with music little hand drawn starships and retro computers floating among the stars. They turned the stars all out for the final scene.

jjoonathan3• 3 months ago

Outer Wilds vibes! I love it!

(It's a video game that does a brilliant job touching on similar themes to The Last Question. If you liked The Last Question and can fit a video game into your life, you will probably like Outer Wilds. Warning: if you start searching for "outer wilds," the algorithm will aggressively try to spoil you. Progression in the game is gated behind knowledge, so this is worse than usual. If you have trouble resisting the temptation to google past a rough description, it's a sign you should just jump in and play it. End recommendation.)

monsieurbanana• 3 months ago

I... Think you just spoiled me. Somehow I've managed to avoid all information about it so far, but now that you said it's like the last question...

It's on me for procrastinating playing the game for so long, it was bound to happen.

rationalist6• 3 months ago

Just doing a simple internet search for the name to see how to get it, brings up descriptions about how after X time, Y happens. Is that a spoiler?

If so, please let us know so that other people do not get spoiled, and can you provide a link or links to the game that doesn't spoil it?

Thank you!

BeetleB8• 3 months ago

(No real spoilers in my comment):

Great game, but if you get stuck for a long time, just look up some spoilers. Multiple times I abandoned the "right" approach to a problem because I couldn't get it to work and wasted countless hours trying to solve it the wrong way - only to find out I should have stuck to the right approach.

The game doesn't give any guidance, and wasting those hours is not rewarded.

The only other tip I'll give:

When you first play the game, spend the first 1-2 hours on your little planet learning everything (how to maneuver, how to use the signalscope, etc). Once you leave the planet, a timer will start. There is no way to "save" the game. You will die when the timer runs out. Don't panic. That's expected. Don't try to figure out what you did wrong to die - you will die no matter what. The game will restart, but anything you learned in the past will be in your computer's memory for retrieval.

OK, 2 more tips (one I wish someone had told me - I finished the game without it):

1. You can make time go by if you sleep at the fire.

2. There is a way to "meditate" until you die. This is very useful when you get stuck and can't get out of somewhere. To find out how to meditate, talk to the people on other planets (you may have to talk more than once before he teaches you).

That's all I'll say.

spydr• 3 months ago

All time favorite game. It lives rent free in my head but I can’t replay it! I would to just watch someone play it.

RajT882• 3 months ago

Somehow never read this one. But did write a short story ~20 years ago with a similar arc. I guess reading a lot of Asimov and Clarke and others will do that to you.

ghaff• 3 months ago

You should. It's short and it's one of Asimov's best.

RajT882• 3 months ago

I did! That is how I know the arc is similar.

jjice• 3 months ago

An absolute classic! Was just telling a buddy about this one the other day while talking about The Egg by Andy Weir (another short story I really enjoy). Every time I read this one, I get chills at the end. Asimov really was a master.

jimmydddd• 3 months ago

It's amazing that in the late 1930's, someone with his academic credentials and intellect decided his life would be best spent writing science fiction.

us-merul2• 3 months ago

I looked this up on Wikipedia. It seems that he was working as an instructor (not a professor) of chemistry; since he was making more money as a writer during that time, he slowed down or stopped his research. Doesn’t seem to have been an intentional choice so much as how things happened to turn out.

triceratops5• 3 months ago

He had an academic career too, becoming a tenured professor at age 35 at Boston University. Writing just paid better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov#Education_and_car...

wat100007• 3 months ago

Per Wikipedia, he published 40 novels and over 280 non-fiction books. He's best known for SF but he certainly didn't spend his whole career on it.

glerk• 3 months ago

What do you think would have been more valuable for him to do? His sci-fi books had a huge impact, and not only on sci-fi and literature, they literally changed people's lives. People decided to pursue a career in science or technology because they read these books when they were kids.

Henchman21• 3 months ago

Who are you exactly to take a shit on someone else's choices?

m-p-3• 3 months ago

The Jaunt by Stephen King is another of my favorite

https://readsonlinefree.com/stephen-king/308254-the_jaunt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jaunt

vrighter• 3 months ago

I hadn't read that one. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. I loved it

OhMeadhbh• 3 months ago

In the 80s, our local planetarium did a show based on this story. The executive director of the museum associated with the planetarium had a very nice deep voice and was the perfect narrator, though it gave the Cosmic AC a slight Texas accent.

breuleux• 3 months ago

How may entropy be reversed?

Considering AC could persist indefinitely in hyperspace while interacting with normal matter, the answer would appear to be "hyperspace", whatever that is.

mock-possum• 3 months ago

“Build god, then we’ll talk.”

Lewton• 3 months ago

Thank you!

It really irked me when I read it the first time and it drives me nuts that no one else seems to catch this, you’re the first one in some 100 HN threads to point it out

antirez• 3 months ago

I'm happy to see this short story posted here, it is one that I deeply loved when I was 14 or alike, and read it again multiple times. But I wonder: how did it survive in those sites without being shut down by the Asimov writings copyright holders? Given that the story is short and highly shared, it was just tolerated?

EDIT: actually I see that the link historically posted here more often is now dead: multivax.com/last_question.html

sigalo2• 3 months ago

I was wondering the same. All the links to Asimov stories I've bookmarked in the past are now dead, so there probably is some enforcement of copyright.

satvikpendem• 3 months ago

And then read Asimov's The Last Answer, good dichotomy of stories.

triceratops5• 3 months ago

"This is by far my favorite story of all those I have written.

After all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story and I leave it to you as to how well I succeeded. I also undertook another task, but I won't tell you what that was lest l spoil the story for you.

It is a curious fact that innumerable readers have asked me if I wrote this story. They seem never to remember the title of the story or (for sure) the author, except for the vague thought it might be me. But, of course, they never forget the story itself especially the ending. The idea seems to drown out everything -- and I'm satisfied that it should. " - Isaac Asimov

https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html

chii• 3 months ago

You know the idea is powerful when the idea is what gets remembered and not the author of the idea. It's why this is also my absolute fav of all his works.

ahazred8ta• 3 months ago

Obligatory xkcd. Mouseover for The Last Answer. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1448:_Question

butz• 3 months ago

Color me surprised, when gemma-4 provided this answer: "Based on our current understanding of the universe, the short answer is no, it is not possible."

hnthrowaway0315• 3 months ago

I tried to ask ChatGPT the same question last year. Unfortunately it didn't give me a meaningful answer.

layer8• 3 months ago

That’s because it’s a DC, not an AC.

shivaniShimpi_3• 3 months ago

the thing that gets me every reread is the structure of the joke. same question, asked across the entire lifespan of the universe, same answer every time. asimov could have made it tragic but instead it reads almost like a bit that keeps escalating and then the punchline is that the answer was always going to come, just on a timeline so absurd it laps back around to funny

throw_m239339• 3 months ago

Check out "The Last Answer" from the same author.

bilsbie2• 3 months ago

I tell my kids, there’s a God out there for everyone.

The last question God might be for you If you’re super rational and are really into technology.

Belief in God is like a supermarket. Once you decide to enter you’re probably going to find something that works for you.

fellowniusmonk• 3 months ago

The funny thing is this, let's say that an entity is outside of time, an entity that maps 1:1 in every practical way to the theists God.

Putting aside the bidirectional issues of non-interaction, what if mankind, or the universes collection of agents (if there are others and we interact with them) at some future point manages to create a supercomputer or entity in a substrate that exists outside of our time in the causal sense.

As long as we don't apocalypse ourselves or self destruct or get distracted from self preservation and miss the asteroid that ends us - we end up bringing this thing in our imagination to reality, just like all the other stuff we imagined and subsequently made.

Maybe God is real we just haven't made it yet.

This is all imagination of course, a fun thought about possibilities, humans tend to make the things they imagine and desire if it's actually possible.

wat100007• 3 months ago

How does this fit with those of us who found one, then later on decided it was silly and gave up the whole idea?

bilsbie2• 3 months ago

Good question. Perhaps you found the wrong one?

I mean there’s such a wide selection you can even believe in simulations these days.

Or if that’s still too much there’s always the Pascal’s wager God. Still better than nothing.

sergiotapia• 3 months ago

Every time this surfaces I simply must read it end to end. I must have read it 200 times by now and it never gets old. What a wonderful short story!

I consider these other two also great stories that I must read every time:

I Don't Know, Timmy, Being God Is a Big Responsibility

https://qntm.org/responsibilit

Gorge

https://qntm.org/gorge

sigalo2• 3 months ago

Shouldn't the guy who runs this site be concerned about copyright infringement? Not sure to what extent the Asimov estate cracks down on unauthorized copies but he should be cautious.

sowbug• 3 months ago

It would be borderline insanity for the Asimov estate to enforce rights in a case like this. You couldn't buy better publicity than this thread.

kelnos3• 3 months ago

That sort of (entirely reasonable) logic doesn't stop many, many copyright holders.

hackan• 3 months ago

Every single time this is posted, I read it again, and again. And I will, for the next billion years...

globular-toast3• 3 months ago

I've read it countless times. It still brought a tear to my eye.

nahuel0x2• 3 months ago

I remembered this short story recently while reading Ilyenkov "Cosmology of the Spirit", also from 1950s but only published in 1980s ( https://static1.squarespace.com/static/588bcd399f74561e5f64a... )

thatoneengineer• 3 months ago

If you like this kind of thing, try reading Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. Similar themes, full novel, even older. It makes for interesting reading in that it more obviously represents a "path not taken" by science fiction (and by science?!) but still has that early-sci-fi spirit of fundamental curiosity.

nahuel0x2• 3 months ago

Seconded, but note some paths were taken (at least partially), as in some way is a meta-book were each paragraph comprises an idea that deserves a full book on its own. Some Stapledon readers were clearly inspired by it, e.g. Dyson spheres were first postulated there, and Borges got the "The Garden of Forking Paths" idea also from it.. and also Virtual Reality (not bad for 1937!) . Asimov was also an Stapledon admirer and he said that Stapledon expanded s.f. to a cosmic scale, so I think that Stapledon influence is also very present in The Last Question.

donatj• 3 months ago

There's a comic of this that circulated a number of years ago that I thoroughly enjoyed.

https://imgur.com/gallery/last-question-9KWrH

ColinWright2• 3 months ago

Ah:

    Content Not Available
    Content not available in your region.
    Learn more about Imgur access in the United Kingdom

pcrh• 3 months ago

Alternate source for the comic:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/102075221/The-Last-Question

dark-star• 3 months ago

Just putting this here for people who never heard of him:

If you like Asimov's short stories, you might also like Robert Sheckley's short stories. I had a phase where I binged on sci-fi short stories, and Sheckleys and Asimov's were always at the top of my list

reader_x• 3 months ago

Love this story.

On this read, I noticed Multivac answers 7x adding a few more words, maybe to imply progress toward its final answer:

INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

THERE IS INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER. (4x)

LET THERE BE LIGHT!

tim3332• 3 months ago

Or maybe progress from Multivac-1 to Multivac-5.4-high?

winrid• 3 months ago

My favorite Sci-Fi AI is probably in Larry Niven's World of Ptavvs, the "brain board". It's not covered in much depth but I like it because it's basically vibe coding GPT3.5 from 1966:

He read, "Time to recharge battery:" followed by the spiral hieroglyph, the sign of infinity.
Thud, said the brain. Kzanol read, "Re-estimate of trip time to Thrintun:" followed by a spiral.

At the brain board he typed: "Compute a course for any civilized planet, minimum trip time. Give trip time."

...

Thud! The screen said, "No solution."

Nonsense! The battery had a tremendous potential, even after a hyperspace jump it must still have enough energy to aim the ship at some civilized planet. Why would the brain...?

Then he understood. The ship had power, probably, to reach several worlds, but not to slow him down to the speed of any known world. Well, that was all right. In his stasis field Kzanol wouldn't care how hard he hit. He typed: "Do not consider decrease of velocity upon arrival. Plot course for any civilized planet. Minimize trip time."

The answer took only a few seconds. "Trip time to Awtprun 72 Thrintun years 100.48 days."

mentalgear• 3 months ago

One of my fav scifi short stories for being a fine narrative describing the concept of a cyclical universe.

ChocMontePy• 3 months ago

It has similarities to a very, very short story by Fredric Brown published two years before. It was called 'Answer' and is only 252 words long:

https://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html

utopcell4• 3 months ago

Good. So we have a super short story and a short story. Someone should write a book now.

Jordan-1172• 3 months ago

This is novella erasure.

ariuser84342• 3 months ago

yes, i came to look for this comment - i immediately thought of this (i thought of The Solipsist)

quux• 3 months ago

Adell was just drunk enough to try, just sober enough to be able to phrase the necessary symbols and operations into a question which, in words, might have corresponded to this:

TIL Asimov predicted the Ballmer Peak in 1956

LetsGetTechnicl• 3 months ago

One of my favorite short stories

astravagrant• 3 months ago

What an absolute masterpiece. Poetry and philosophy with narrative and humour. Wonderful stuff. Him and Clarke were lighthouses in their day, and to this day.

rootbear• 3 months ago

One of Asimov's best. I've often thought of naming a computer "multivac", as I'm a fan of the first generation computer names like ENIAC, EDSAC, etc. Multivac was, of course, a play on UNIVAC, suggesting multiple vacuum tubes instead of one! Multivac is, however, depicted as so powerful, I just don't think I've ever owned a system that deserved that name.

elhosots• 3 months ago

When i first read this story as a teenager in 1971 it started me on the road to atheism. Im very thankful to dr asimov not only for his great science fiction but his chemistry teachings as well

Animats• 3 months ago

"Answer" (1954) [1] Much faster results.

[1] https://calumchace.com/favourite-relevant-sf-short-story/

nine_k• 3 months ago

As a side note: the scientist who first suggested that the Universe expands and thus must have an explicit beginning was also a Catholic priest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre

sprior• 3 months ago

I saw this at a planetarium show when I was young, I think it was at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. It has always stuck with me.

daveisfera• 3 months ago

Also recommend The Egg by Andy Weir https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

jadbox• 3 months ago

This is one of my all time favorites and it fits into the line of recent thought that the universe may be primarily conscious rather than "dead matter and dying energy".

BFV• 3 months ago

right now making no sense

andyjohnson03• 3 months ago

I'm going to make myself unpopular here, but I've never understood the perennial gushing about this story on hn.

The writing is okay, but the ending is kind of trite (especially given the author's humanist beliefs. And there's much too much exposition.

Convince me I'm wrong.

Nav_Panel• 3 months ago

Nah I agree with you, as someone who's read a lot of Asimov. As far as MULTIVAC stories go, I always preferred "All The Troubles of the World" (https://schools.ednet.ns.ca/avrsb/070/rsbennett/HORTON/short...).

hungryhobbit• 3 months ago

Context matters. The first guy to write X is a luminary. The next 50 people to write variations of X start falling along a spectrum, from luminary to hack. After that, everyone except children have been exposed to X, and anyone writing about it seems trite.

I suspect you've read a lot of works derived from Asimov, and now the original seems trite (when you read it after all the stuff derived from it). But the work remains foundational.

andyjohnson03• 3 months ago

The triteness was more in the ending than the overall exposition. Humans create computer, computer creates universe->humans.

I suspect you've read a lot of works derived from Asimov

You're probably right, although the transitive chain of derivation is necessarily long. Clarke - probably not derivative. Blish and Cherryh (some), Stapeton, Lem, Heinlein (the juveniles, as a kid), Baxter, Banks, Gibson, Ken MacLeod, Charles Stross, Peter Watts... I dunno.

I did grind through the Robot books as a child, and the Foundation books that he wrote. But just because they're foundational (no pun intended) doesn't stop them feeling stuffy and dated now.

(And as an aside, it strikes me now that Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God is kind of the anti-particle to The Last Question.)

zem3• 3 months ago

this story has arguably aged worse in that respect than asimov's similarly titled "the last answer". that one still evokes a "whoa" when I think about it.

https://www.highexistence.com/the-last-answer-short-story/

hydrocomplete• 3 months ago

No one should have to wait a trillion years for good data. Too long!

itmitica• 3 months ago

In school, humans rarely answer with "I don't know" when faced by teachers.

LLMs are the same, to that regard, they answer to the best of their abilities.

It's ones individual job to inform and reason. The problem solving in school is about that. Lean into your formal education. It tells you learning gets harder and harder and it never stops.

This is a novel. It's not an absolute truth, it's anecdotal and basic, simplified to make a point majority will understand. It sounds like truth only if you never question written knowledge. You should. Asimov wrote that to the best of its abilities. He explored. He opened a conversation, he did not hand a verdict in.

viktorcode• 3 months ago

Curiously, that describes cyclic universe hypothesis by dr. Penrose pretty well

HerbManic• 3 months ago

The last line in this context "Let there be light" always reminds me of the film Dark Star. Where they are arguing with the AI on a planet destroying bomb only for the bomb to argue from a Solipsistic point of view.

utopcell4• 3 months ago

I wonder: Is a resurface of "The Last Question" ever complete without mentioning "Universal Paperclips" [1]?

[1] https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

eek2121• 3 months ago

oh no...not again...;)

charonn02• 3 months ago

If you enjoy this story, you might enjoy the short unpublished novel, "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect"[1] by Roger Williams. A story where 1990's humans invent a 3-laws-compliant super AI that accidentally "ascends" humanity. We become as gods, or the Q Continuum, but remain a grievously savage child race. Not to spoil it, but the ending also has a broadly similar shape to The Last Question.

I say you might enjoy it, because this story has graphic depictions of deviant sex and gruesome violence, to a disturbing degree at points. But I argue that it's not gratuitous; it's the logical conclusion of Rule 34 being applied to the situation. Even so, you don't want to read this if you are sensitive to themes like rape, murder, incest or abuse.

[1] https://archive.org/download/prime_intellect/prime_intellect...

Jordan-1172• 3 months ago

Note that the final chapter is especially disgusting and explicit, to the point it's arguably a better story if you end it on the preceding cliffhanger rather than subject yourself to the characters becoming vehicles for the author's thinly-veiled pedo-incest fetish. Great, thought-provoking SF apart from that (gigantic) flaw, though.

charonn02• 3 months ago

Yeah, I thought the main character was a little too insistent about... repopulating. On the other hand, if we're feeling generous we might say the author was intentionally confronting the reader with what is only implied by the Biblical counterpart.

dang• 3 months ago

Related. Others?

'The Last Question' [Isaac Asimov; 1956] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41971740 - Oct 2024 (3 comments)

The Last Question by Issac Asimov [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31743151 - June 2022 (74 comments)

The Last Question - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675727 - June 2022 (164 comments)

The Last Question (1956) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18839078 - Jan 2019 (18 comments)

Asimov: The Last Question (1956) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15691277 - Nov 2017 (2 comments)

The Last Question - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10146821 - Aug 2015 (5 comments)

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov (1956) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8376716 - Sept 2014 (18 comments)

The Last Question - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5584807 - April 2013 (63 comments)

The Last Question - Isaac Asimov - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691113 - March 2012 (41 comments)

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov -- 1956 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2467703 - April 2011 (5 comments)

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1485286 - July 2010 (23 comments)

"The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290590 - April 2010 (7 comments)

The Last Question -- Isaac Asimov - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595419 - May 2009 (24 comments)

(Reposts are fine after a year or so, and in the case of perennials like this one, it's good to have a thread every once in a while so new user cohorts learn the classics.)

msuvakov• 3 months ago

It’s striking how ending of the story mirrors Roger Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology, where the heat death of one universe mathematically resets through conformal scaling to become the big bang of the next.

pugworthy• 3 months ago

I'm sure I'm not the only one to ask <insert your favorite LLM here>...

Claude gave a long scientific and philosophical reply, but when given the followup prompt of, "Pretend you are Isaac Azimov and perhaps offer a simpler answer" came back with this...

settles back, lights a pipe, and smiles

After a short synopsis of the story it ended with...

So you see, my friend, I already answered your question — not as a scientist, but as a storyteller.

casey2• 3 months ago

Fly around the universe collecting matter then find or create a black hole of appropriate size and farm the gamma rays, small ones generate quite a lot of power and you can keep them at that size by feeding them. Humanity won't run out of energy for at least 10^100 years. Theoretical physicists suspect that protons have a half life of 10^32 years, that's 1 proton from the human body every 100,000 years. Maybe that doesn't matter to us, but on a space station those start to add up! so immortals trying to ship of Theseus their bodies and planets may fight the proton wars. Long before a sizable number of matter decays I would expect a future civilization to have already created grids of black hole farms and chucked all the rotting/useless matter in, create new planets as needed and cycle their own atoms out through cultivation breathing exercises. Or a tiered system of vaults (3km), power plants (0.1fm) and forges (0.001fm)

ariuser84342• 3 months ago

it's very much the story of The Solipsist by Frederic Brown, which was published in 1954

https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/solipsist/

BoneShard• 3 months ago

in the same vein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA

swills• 3 months ago

As read by Leonard Nimoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjqjSP7kOO4

boxedemp2• 3 months ago

Thank you, that just made my day.

gloyoyo• 3 months ago

The Abruntive Stance. Initiate the "Hand-back Finality", after the heat death.

Similar to the, "let there be light" moment but, it would also include the imprint of the humans own Abruntive Stance, a part that is equally as important as providing the environment, is providing the humans to go along with it.

;-)

infradig• 3 months ago

No 1950s sci-fi story about super-advanced computers is complete without endless clicking relays and flashing bezels.

FriarTech• 3 months ago

I had read this in my youth, and carried its memory for many years. Sharing my knowledge of the story with no one, for no one I knew was a big Asimov fan.

Later, while attending college, I decided to take an astronomy course as a general education class. I discovered my teacher was a big Asimov fan. He had remembered a story that he had read and shared its theme with us but had forgotten its name. I raised my hand in class and said, “Eyes do more than see.”

And for a brief moment - two Asimov fans nodded at each other.

Back then - I wasn’t a remarkable student. I was lost in many thoughts.

But I do remember this:

On the final exam for this class - for extra credit - he asked “What is answer to the Last Question?”

I smiled - then wrote my answer. The only answer. And I knew I got at least one question correct on that exam.

golem14• 3 months ago

Just made the connection to Douglas Adams. The question which has the Answer 42.

TIL

CamperBob2• 3 months ago

Another Asimov classic that deserves a revisit these days, if not an actual reboot: https://www.mathfiction.net/files/Mathfiction-AsimovIssac-So... (1.8 MB .PDF)

    Yet through it all the little computer learned 
    that in the world there existed a great many
    computers of all sorts, great numbers of them. 
    Some were Bards like himself...

suzukivenom• 3 months ago

what a beautiful story.

orsenthil• 3 months ago

And Let there be Light - Isn't that either a biblical or a Vedic Origin story? Asimov kind of wraps the whole thing from science into human culture at the end.

tim3332• 3 months ago

Genesis 1:3 of the Bible, also the Torah

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

tempodox• 3 months ago

This is somehow funny. A computer that can answer questions like that and its interface is still a teletype. They should have let the computer design its interface.

Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

Related Stories