Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

>INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER

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

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.

If you enjoy this story, you might enjoy the short unpublished novel, "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect"[1] by Roger Williams.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...

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

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.

"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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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!

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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

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... )

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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."

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!

In a similar vein: https://calumchace.com/favourite-relevant-sf-short-story/

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.

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)

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

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

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.

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

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

One of my favorite short stories

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.

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

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

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

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.

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."

right now making no sense

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Claude Mythos