If you haven’t read it before, don’t read the Wikipedia summary; read the actual story. It’s easy to google and pretty short.<p>Isaac Asimov said it was his favorite story he’d written. He imagines the entire history of the future of humanity, to the end of time, in a few pages. Really a marvelous story.
One of my favorite things about HN, is how, every once in a while, some obscure cool thing I have not hear about before gets pointed out, which, I find cool. But then, we "hug it to death" in the HN vernacular. Which is also really cool. Some neglected corner of the web that someone cared about, suddenly, a bunch of us nerds jump on it and recognize the nerd-coolness of it. I love that. Hope this was OK to say and not too off topic. I just love that.
This feels relevant: Roger Penrose - Why Did Our Universe Begin? <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypjZF6Pdrws" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypjZF6Pdrws</a><p>tl;dw: It is well known that the universe expands, tracing this back in time leads to the singularity called the Big Bang. But is it possible to ask for a "before" the beginning of time? What is time? Time is what we measure with clocks. What are clocks? Something that returns to the same state (say, a pendulum, or the earth orbiting around the sun - a "year"). To be able to build a clock you need mass. Only objects with mass, moving below the speed of light, experience time. In the very far future, after all stars have burned out, the only objects remaining will be black holes. Eventually, even they will decay due to Hawking radiation. So in the end, there will be only expanding space, and radiation that "travels to infinity". Photons themselves do not experience time as they move with the speed of light. Without mass, without anything that has a notion of time, the concept of distance becomes meaningless. The universe will become spacelike. Without distances, the universe may as well be a singular point. Like the Big Bang :)
A similarly thought-provoking short story, perhaps my favorite, is The Egg[1] by Andy Weir.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egg_(Weir_short_story)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egg_(Weir_short_story)</a>
Also check out "The Last Answer", the only work by Asimov I've read that actually terrified me.<p>If it takes place in the same universe as "The Last Question", you could argue it has a bit of a "Roko's basilisk" flavor.
Here’s the actual short story. It’s a quick read: <a href="https://physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf</a><p>This is one of the short stories that that has stuck with me for life. Highly recommend reading it.<p>Edit: I actually learned of the story from a HN submission years ago. It has been discussed here many times: <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?q=the+last+question" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?q=the+last+question</a>
So I asked Wolfram Alpha:<p><a href="https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Can+entropy+be+reversed" rel="nofollow">https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Can+entropy+be+reversed</a>
This has a similar flavor to Arthur C. Clarke's 9 Billion Names of God<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/ninebillionnames00clar" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/ninebillionnames00clar</a>
Ironically, 'The Answer'[1] was written two years before the 'Last Question'. Equally ironically, the 'The Answer' is shorter (and in my opinion better) than the the 'Question'.<p>(1) <a href="https://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html</a>
You can find it here, it's an amazing story:<p><a href="https://ipfs.eternum.io/ipfs/QmSiaEmhLvFdzzvkBmJKtRDmZRNDpDt2USzy3zRbsqeYdh/" rel="nofollow">https://ipfs.eternum.io/ipfs/QmSiaEmhLvFdzzvkBmJKtRDmZRNDpDt...</a>
If you've already read the story, this illustrated version is a good adaptation: <a href="https://imgur.com/gallery/9KWrH" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/gallery/9KWrH</a><p>(Read the original first though.)
One of my favorite shorts, Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu<p><a href="https://gizmodo.com/read-ken-lius-amazing-story-that-swept-the-hugo-nebula-5958919" rel="nofollow">https://gizmodo.com/read-ken-lius-amazing-story-that-swept-t...</a>
Link to online text, looks like scan of original printing, with illustrations! :<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Series_v04n05_1956-11_slpn/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Se...</a>
Wait, are you telling me there are people out there who don’t know Asimov and haven’t read one of his best short stories??? The Last Question, along with Nightfall and The Last Answer are generally accepted as the best.
A manga version:<p><a href="http://m.fanfox.net/manga/the_last_question/c000/1.html" rel="nofollow">http://m.fanfox.net/manga/the_last_question/c000/1.html</a>
The apotheosis of a machine as the restarting point of a cyclical time-loop, it must have astonished the audience especially at the time. To the best of my finite reckoning, it boils down to a pantheistic/monistic model because either the materium is eternal fundamental base reality where the [man -> machine -> god-> man] cycle plays, or there's a monad god of some sort which gave rise to the cycle, and AC/Multi-vac is a lion-snake eating its own tail, a combination of the Demiurge and Oroboros.<p>It's potentially also Roko's Basilisk, because if the eternally looping machine knew you are aware of it, and you tried to break the time-cycle to prevent the re-creation of itself and everything (samsara?), you could end up being punished in an endless eternal while(1){existence;}. Maybe in that sense it's like the Tenma of the sixth heaven getting in the way of those seeking to break from that cycle, but I know less about this.<p>In spite of these links to a deeply cyclical creation, life and existence, it starts the end speaking the words of a deity usually strongly held to have a through-and-through YOLO creation (miraculous resurrections notwithstanding).
Dammit. I'd conflated two stories in my head. Or imagined one entirely.<p>There's a similar story to the The Last Question (and it's not "The Last Answer")<p>In this story, the question was more "meaning of life" and the computer has the answer but those asking were incapable of understanding it. I seem to remember similar back and forth over time but that might be me getting mixed up between the two stories.<p>And no - I don't think it's Douglas Adams related.
This was the first Asimov piece I ever read. Stumbled upon it online, a simple .txt document in my browser, I read the first words, and browsed on.. Only to have them linger a few minutes, so I went back and read the entire thing and fell in love with the story and so started my adventures into science fiction reading.
Can anybody recommend an anthology available on Kindle that contains this story? Ideally Asimov only, but fine if it also contains stories by others. I couldn't easily find one. Thanks!
The deification of computers seems woven in to culture in invisible
ways now. Along with it comes centralisation and ultimately a fusion
into a singularity.<p>There are people, who deep in their hearts don't want individual tools
to expand and improve themselves, but something new to kneel down and
pray to.<p>I place this struggle squarely on the humanist <-> anti-humanist axis.
I saw it at the Fels Planetarium of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia apparently in 1973 when I was 8 years old and always remembered it and even kept thinking about it every once in a while.
There's an audio book version available on YouTube <a href="https://youtu.be/ojEq-tTjcc0" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ojEq-tTjcc0</a>
A different take on this by Scott Alexander: :-) <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-deep-the-rabbit-hole-goes/" rel="nofollow">https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-dee...</a>
novel read in french <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CqLY4OVz4Q" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CqLY4OVz4Q</a>