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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.
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.)
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.
"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
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.
Obligatory xkcd. Mouseover for The Last Answer. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1448:_Question
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.
The Jaunt by Stephen King is another of my favorite
I hadn't read that one. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. I loved it
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Lots of good comments over the years -> https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%09Isaac+Asimov%3A+The+Last+Questi...
Also recommend The Egg by Andy Weir
https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
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...
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?
There's a comic of this that circulated a number of years ago that I thoroughly enjoyed.
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:
> 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.
"Answer" (1954) [1] Much faster results.
[1] https://calumchace.com/favourite-relevant-sf-short-story/
I wonder: Is a resurface of "The Last Question" ever complete without mentioning "Universal Paperclips" [1]?
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!
>INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER
Boy, it sure would be nice if real LLMs were capable of giving an answer like that.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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
And then read Asimov's The Last Answer, good dichotomy of stories.
Every single time this is posted, I read it again, and again. And I will, for the next billion years...
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.
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
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
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!
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.
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.
In a similar vein: https://calumchace.com/favourite-relevant-sf-short-story/
As read by Leonard Nimoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjqjSP7kOO4
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... )
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
;-)