Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)
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(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.)
It's on me for procrastinating playing the game for so long, it was bound to happen.
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!
There, I said it. The reason I say it openly is because I almost quit the game not understanding that this is supposed to happen.
Not really much of a spoiler.
At it's core, it's a game about exploration to understand what's happening. I recommend looking around and being curious to enjoy it, and avoid rushing. It's my favorite game.
To give you an estimate, I completed the base game with all secrets in about 20-30h. There's also a DLC called "Echoes of Eyes" adding a new area to explore. In total, I spent 45h to fully complete the game.
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.
> Proceed to spoil the whole game
The lack of knowledge about the other two items I mentioned are also reasons people stopped playing the game. If you don't know them, the game becomes an incredible drag. Even I would have quit if I didn't know about meditation.
The fact that the game would start all over each time made me think I hadn't progressed enough to save the game. And because the first time round, the timer doesn't really begin until you leave space, I thought I would have to do all the training (jetpack, etc) each time. I remember being very frustrated - I had spent well over an hour playing it and it didn't even save the game?
And felt the same thing the second time round.
Then I abandoned the game for about a year. The only reason I returned to it was because I couldn't understand why so many would like such a game. So I finally searched online on how to save the game and ... oh, that's why.
As I said, look on various forums, and you'll see plenty of people quitting the game early because they didn't understand this. There's a whole thread on the subreddit on frustrations of players who recommended the game to friends - a significant percentage quit the game before they got to any of the interesting parts.
I think revealing this is a decent compromise to ensure people will actually play the game.
I played the game years ago and did not have this element spoiled, and I thought it was presented at exactly the right time and in the right way. I'd go so far as to say that if somebody is so frustrated by that early mystery (which you're all but guaranteed to understand better and better as you play) that they quit there, then the rest of the game will just be an exercise in misery. It's a puzzle game. The developers put settings in place to cut the flight mechanics out of it so people could just experience it as a puzzle box instead of a flight simulator as well. What they did NOT put in the game is a hint about the thing you're spoiling.
Please consider accepting what your critics are telling you, and remove the spoiler.
I do have some sympathy for the frustration. I don't think neurotype has anything to do with it. Struggling to phrase this in a non-spoilery way, but I think individual experience really depends on where they are in the game at the time of the reveal. I almost quit because of this as well - very glad I didn't.
This could be explained without spoilers though. Something like "There's a moment in the first few hours where you may want to quit. DON'T. Stick with it, I promise it's worth it."
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
No he eventually became a full professor too.
"He began work in 1949 with a $5,000 salary(equivalent to $68,000 in 2025), maintaining this position for several years. By 1952, however, he was making more money as a writer than from the university, and he eventually stopped doing research, confining his university role to lecturing students.[g] In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from his teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, due to his lack of research. After a struggle over two years, he reached an agreement with the university that he would keep his title and give the opening lecture each year for a biochemistry class. On October 18, 1979, the university honored his writing by promoting him to full professor of biochemistry."
I thought the whole point of getting tenure is that you can't get fired.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov#Education_and_car...
Indeed after becoming a giant of the field in the 1940s and 1950s, when he wrote most of the novels and short stories we know him for (Robots, Foundation and Empire) he took a long hiatus. In the 1960s and 70s, as far as I can tell, his meager sci-fi output consisted of some short stories, a couple of novelizations of sci-fi movies, and a standalone novel (The Gods Themselves).
After Sputnik he focused on science writing, believing that to be more widely useful.
He only returned to writing more Foundation, Robots, and Empire novels in the 1980s.
https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue4-8.h...
I don’t know how people managed to write graphics card drivers back in the day. In the 80d it’s going to be all assembly code too, I think.
They are more black magic than the non-driver kernel components. I can at least understand the concept of kernel components such as VFS/Scheduler and read legacy kernel code without too much trouble, but drivers, even those in Linux 0.12 back in 1991, are crazily hard for me.
https://www.doncio.navy.mil/CHIPS/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=547...
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?
https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9si6r9/postmortem...
https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9si6r9/postmortem...
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.
A short anonymous joke that may or may not be true is better than a long story that is almost certainly made-up by someone in authority.
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
Over the longer term and adjusted for inflation of course. Any manufactured good that isn't supply constrained really.
Either the products have gotten cheaper (food) or the product has become significantly better at a similar price point (cars) and, often times, both (televisions).
Food is much more expensive, like 30% here in Europe, much faster growth than inflation. And before you state that food is accounted for in inflation: economists are doing some dirty tricks here by finding subpar replacements.
Cars are also much more expensive for the same quality, far surpassing inflation.
I will concede TVs and electronic gadgets, though.
[1]https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending....
> Cars are also much more expensive for the same quality, far surpassing inflation.
Cars are much, much more value then they used to be.
The Slate truck is as close to what cars used to be in the seventies. No power steering, no power brakes, no crumple zones, no fuel injection, etc. All those features cost a lot of money yet the amount of money spent on cars really hasn't gone up in accordance.
A 1970 Honda Civic cost 2k base. A base model today appears to be around 25k. that's more than inflation but it's also a luxury car, in comparison.
The vehicle market is less about low pricing as much as it is feature sets at price points. In other words, the prices stay roughly static but they pack in more features.
People think they can do one-sentence quips to describe how economies work.
Housing doesn't really fit into the conversation at hand about cheaper labor leading to lower prices.
Something interesting that touches on both of these topics (housing and product cost) is that, if you look at how much of household income is spent on housing and food combined, they stay fairly constant. As commodity goods get cheaper and cheaper, more money is spent on the inelastic and luxury goods.
A conversation that you reframed from wealth distribution to the weirdly much more narrow “cheaper products for end users”. Even though wealth inequality has been studied plenty in itself.
I’m not buying the mind-commodity that you’re selling.
A further up comment refers to robots picking strawberries.
~30% of new construction is labor. ~50% of repair is labor.
Have you ever dealt with home repair or building or are you just regurgitating whatever the LLM told you.
And what percentage of a house's price is the building?
> ~50% of repair is labor.
And how much does the average home owner spend on repairs a month?
I've been in my current house for almost 3 years. I've had one significant repair that would have cost around 3k. I did it myself but that was the quote. Not too bad.
In places where people are concerned about a housing shortage, the majority of the cost is land.
Anecdotally like half, depending on the area. Plots of land go for $500k in Boston suburbs and new construction homes go for $1m.
This is true in constrained areas like SF bay area. Back when I was digging into real estate economics, I found data on this from HUD, they have a price indicator dataset. https://www.fhfa.gov/research/papers/wp1901
Also look at the Lincoln Institute, they have fantastic studies.
In places like San Francisco, 80% of the value is in the land. In other places, it's 15-35%. The historical national average is about 33% but now it's a bit higher.
Completely different economic rules dominate in constrained areas like San Francisco versus unconstrained areas like Phoenix. But most housing is in unconstrained areas, the constrained areas are expensive elite sections. In most of the country, house prices track construction costs, and the high land prices are effectively economic segregation that weed out antisocial people, causing these areas to be even more desirable and sought after, which raises the bar even higher. All "nice areas" are nice because of gatekeeping, and in the US this is usually high land prices. Traditionally, each city had its own immigration policy, and they would chase out of town people who weren't seen as productive or who were antisocial, and as a result, you would have poor people living on the outskirts of towns.
In places like SF, richer people move in, house prices go up but there is not much change in the population. In other places, more people move in and more housing is built.
A lot of the debate surrounding housing boils down to people imagining a world where SF housing rules applies and thinking this is appropriate national policy, or others looking at national datasets and thinking this would apply to places like SF. Much of housing and land economics seems counterintuitive, for example how cities get less dense over time, e.g. https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/working-papers/pers...
But once you learn how to think about it, it all makes sense.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-3
The story of this decade is that people think the economy is terrible despite the usual metrics like unemployment and inflation being not too bad. One explanation is that before 2008 young people could get on the housing ladder but we quit building single family houses and it got harder to get a mortgage -- you see cranes in the air in many towns and sometimes 5-over-1s going for miles in some places like the DC suburbs.
[1] https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Stiegler_GentleSeduction.pdf
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.
TIL
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...
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
(I second Ender's Game, The Martian, and Project Hail Mary.)
They’re just too dry for my tastes.
Iain Banks's science fiction novels (mostly set in the Culture, but he does have others) are also great.
And yes to the Culture.
Even in a lot of hard SF, a lot of the science is wonky if it falls outside of the author's special interest or area of expertise. Relevant to Asimov, the only reason robots have "positronic" brains in his stories is that positrons were a new discovery at the time and it sounded cool and futuristic to him.
A lot of classic science fiction is basically "x with spaceships" where x is the Napoleonic Wars, or feudal Europe or the Wild West or what have you, and the "science" is little more than set dressing.
Well, it was meant to be parsed as:
Star Trek is speculative fiction and space opera.
Star Wars is just space opera.
Some space opera is also speculative fiction, but I wouldn't say it is a subset. I wouldn't call some space opera stories speculative fiction at all.
They're all classified as science fiction.
(Yes, yes - there is no consensus on these terms...typically science fiction is considered a subset of speculative fiction, and here I inverted a lot of things).
Later works, less so.
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...
It's not really sci-fi but I also really enjoyed The Merchant And The Alchemist's Gate, and the one about the tower of babel, I forget the name at the moment.
it's brilliant
You may have already read his story The Library of Babel: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...
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.
For others who share some similarities, though with a greater emphasis on character and adventure, perhaps Hal Clement, Larry Niven or Robert L. Forward.
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.
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).
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.
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Learn more about Imgur access in the United KingdomConsidering AC could persist indefinitely in hyperspace while interacting with normal matter, the answer would appear to be "hyperspace", whatever that is.
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
[1] https://calumchace.com/favourite-relevant-sf-short-story/
Boy, it sure would be nice if real LLMs were capable of giving an answer like that.
They com like that from factory. Hardcoded to never say no.
Lot of confabulation going on in the moist blob of electrochemistry found encased within the hydroxyapatite crystal cage we call a skull. Why is it that things which rhyme, or get repeated a lot, seem more true? How come some of us suffer uncontrollable seizures from flashing lights?
We have to study reason to get any good at it, we absolutely suck at this without training. Our natural state is illiterate, innumerate, and illogical.
The part of our (all animals, not just humans) intelligence that is most magical*, is how efficient we are with few examples, not reasoning.
* Questions about consciousness will have to wait until we can agree which of the 40+ definitions of the word actually answers the question we care about, and then also we figure out how to actually test for whatever that is.
It's not a guaranteed way to control their behavior, but you can more than move the needle.
Steering an LLM with a prompt is way less reliable than steering a car with a steering wheel, but there's still control. It's just not absolute.
Non?? Only those with sh*tty code, surely.
There's nothing inherently non-deterministic about inference.
There's lots of people with lots of opinions, but you (often) have to pay for the good ones.
That's not an unfair take, I think. Again, just IME, they expect too much because the tool is oversold: it does not deliver that well. And we always hear, this new model is so much better, it's tiring.
I think we should all learn to use LLMs but we should still carefully review what they did. And that is what the employers don't quite get: the review still takes a lot of time. So, gains are not 10x but more like... 10%? Maybe 50 for boiler plate. Still gains are there, I guess.
And unfortunately a lot of people will say it’s their reports’ fault for not properly utilizing it (even as they barely use it) because otherwise they would have to admit that they bought a tool without any plan for how to deploy it. So regardless of what is or isn’t a fair take, the results are the same. We are burdened with utilizing a thing whether it is useful or not and the results are generally not what is measured, but rather “are you using it?”
I’m just glad I work at a company that has more reasonable expectations and has been very slowly, thoughtfully rolling it out to individuals at the company and assessing what is and isn’t good for. They are interested in getting me in line, but as somebody in video production to be perfectly honest the use case for Claude is a bit tricky to navigate. We don’t write a lot of scripts and I already have bespoke software for organizing/maintaining footage that isn’t on a subscription basis. The work I’m also doing doesn’t call for these speed-editing solutions that generate tik tok chaff. All our stuff is hours long and it’s high volume. Any video-centric AI service costs an arm and a leg.
I do think it could be useful for writing some terminal scripts and such, but as far as a daily tool we are still scratching our heads and thinking about it. But it’s nice to be able to do that without somebody saying “why aren’t you using it?” every meeting.
I know I'm shouting into the void, but seriously.
- it's difficult
- ok fine but how
- it's difficult
- right i'll see that but how
- it's difficult
The captain told us that if we took the bus to Humaitá (a smaller provincial city), we could take a smaller boat that would take us to Manaus. But he warned us that the boat only goes once in three days, and that it would leave soon. The last bus to Humaitá would also leave from Porto Velho promptly.
Despite this flimsy instruction, we didn't see any alternative. So we went. With great luck, we caught the bus and made it to Humaitá (I still have a picture of the boat river transfer the bus took: https://bashify.io/i/CdNcLf).
Our time in Humaitá was surreal. When asked about a boat to Manaus. Everyone told us a different story. There was no harbour (hydroviaria) personal. One person told us the boat to Manaus was named "Caçote". Another person said the boat was named something else. Then someone said it had stopped ferrying years ago. No, we heard from someone else, it would come in 5 hours! Yet another one said it was tomorrow. Someone else felt sorry for us because it had just left. I felt like I was in a (difficult) point and click adventure. There weren't a lot of people in town close to the river, so we ran into the same people from time to time. They would often give different answers to the previous time.
No one was willing to tell us they didn't know. Not a single person out of the 20+ we must have talked to.
In the end, a boat arrived. It went in the direction of Manaus. The captain said that he would only go up to Auxiliadora, and that was still a long way from Manaus. Once again without alternatives (going back to Porto Velho would surely mean we'd miss the flight), we chanced it. In the hopes that getting closer was worth it.
When we arrived at Auxiliadora, it was the smallest inhabited place I had ever been to. Perhaps about 13 houses. Some fishermen. No passenger boat would come for days, they told us. Not to take us to Manaus, neither to take us back. The fishermen had boats, I tried to offer them money so they would take us further. But their day was at an end and they wanted to relax, regardless of what I offered them (we were on a tight budget, but I was desperate enough to offer a significant chunk of a monthly wage, no dice).
Then we found out that on the boat with us, a woman had come who was in a similar predicament as us. She was Brazilian, living in MT and wanting to visit family in Manicoré (which was bigger, and closer to Manaus). Exasperated, she ended up convincing her family to come and pick her up with a speedboat. We hitched a ride. We were very thankful.
When we arrived in Manicoré, I felt like exploring the place. It looked so different from anywhere else I had been, like something out of a movie. But I couldn't. The docks were little more than a collection of wooden jettys (trapiche) that ran everywhere in criss-cross fashion. In order to even get to the quayside we would have to pass through many other boats. In the first one we went through, the captain walked past and I asked him whether he knew of a boat going to Manaus. He signalled where to put my bags. We were leaving.
We reached Manaus in the nick of time.
I love this story, and that time. These anecdotes definitely triggered my memory.
its common playbook for corporate self-development in NA.
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".
I don't know any Spaniards but I do know Filipinos and the confidence projection is a real thing. The Filipino IT guy confidently declared that my OnePlus Android phone wasn't certified for the software he was trying to install and was getting errors. It is a bog standard application that can be installed on any modern Android phone but the level of confidence he projected, just because he didn't know OnePlus as a brand, made me doubt myself until I turned on the critical hat and pushed back a little with alternative approaches, which solved the problem.
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
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
Maybe hackernews is becoming reddit...
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.
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.
Asimov's Multivac at least had the dignity to wait.
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
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
God's numbering system is "unlucky".
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.
I can't remember if the machines in "the evitable conflict" are ever called VACs, they might be. The themes in that story do for sure overlap with the story "Franchise" (which is explicitly multivac).
Anyway the multivac from last question probably isn't the same as the one in franchise anyway, because the franchise multivac is the same one as in "all the troubles of the world", and spoilers, but that particular multivac has other problems than entropy. It could be that they "fixed" it, but at this point the timeline with other short stories doesn't add up.
In any case, the VACs would be instances of positronic brains the way the machines in evitable conflict are, so if anything the robots are the ancestors of multivac and not the other way around.
I would say the multivac in "Franchise" is the same Mutlivac as "Last Question" and "all the troubles of the world" (one of my favorites). There are no positronic robots in "Franchise", nor the others.
TIL Asimov predicted the Ballmer Peak in 1956
EDIT: actually I see that the link historically posted here more often is now dead: multivax.com/last_question.html
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
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!
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.
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.
;-)
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.
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.
> 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.)
Also it was written in 1980,.almost three decades after The Last Question. I wonder if part of the difference (to me) is in the evolution of the author's writing practice, or development of themes in SF over that time?
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.
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.
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.
Needless to say, I don’t find them at all convincing. This 'nothing' is much better than catching unconvincing unneeded supernatural entities.
It falls apart because, based on what's actually known, there's no reason to think worshipping might be the thing that condemns you to hell, and not doing so gets you into heaven, rather than the other way around.
Granted, if your belief is based on Pascal's Wager, and is only to hedge your bets, presumably you wouldn't spend much time on religion. But that also raises the question of whether that style of "belief" would be good enough for whatever god might exist.
Granted^2, spending half of your life devoted to a religion could be deemed a small cost when weighed against the eternity afterward. But then you have to think about the idea that you'll have wasted half of your one and only life if the afterlife turns out not to be real.
At any rate, Pascal seems to have failed to consider that there are thousands of religions to choose from, and that a hypothetical god(s) might punish you for choosing to believe in the wrong one. And might even prefer that you believe in nothing, rather than the wrong one!
Pascal did actually consider other religions. He just concluded that they were definitely wrong. In his view, either (his brand of) Christianity was correct, or god doesn’t exist.
didn't know about ooo, maybe because it's not available on namecheap!
If you go up one level, you can see this story is one entry in a great library of stuff:
> 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."
>And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
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.
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...'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.)
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.