"The Last Question" is a science fictionshort story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly and was anthologized in the collections Nine Tomorrows, The Best of Isaac Asimov, Robot Dreams, The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov, the retrospective Opus 100, and in Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Vol. 1. It was Asimov's favorite short story of his own authorship, and is one of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional computer called Multivac. The story overlaps science fiction, theology, and philosophy.
History
In conceiving Multivac, Asimov was extrapolating the trend towards centralization that characterized computation technology planning in the 1950s to an ultimate centrally managed global computer. After seeing a planetarium adaptation of his work, Asimov "privately" concluded that this story was his best science fiction yet written; he placed it just higher than "The Ugly Little Boy" and "The Bicentennial Man". "The Last Question" ranks with "Nightfall" as one of Asimov's best-known and most acclaimed short stories. He wrote in 1973:
Plot summary
The story deals with the development of a series of computers called Multivac and their relationships with humanity through the courses of seven historic settings, beginning on the day in 2061 when Earth becomes a planetary civilization. In each of the first six scenes a different character presents the computer with the same question; namely, how the threat to human existence posed by the heat death of the universe can be averted. The question was: "How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?" This is equivalent to asking: "Can the workings of the second law of thermodynamics be reversed?" Multivac's only response after much "thinking" is: "INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER." The story jumps forward in time into later eras of human and scientific development. In each of these eras someone decides to ask the ultimate "last question" regarding the reversal and decrease of entropy. Each time, in each new era, Multivac's descendant is asked this question, and finds itself unable to solve the problem. Each time all it can answer is an : "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER." In the last scene, the god-like descendant of humanity watches the stars flicker out, one by one, as matter and energy ends, and with it, space and time. Humanity asks AC, Multivac's ultimate descendant, which exists in hyperspace beyond the bounds of gravity or time, the entropy question one last time, before the last of humanity merges with AC and disappears. AC is still unable to answer, but continues to ponder the question even after space and time cease to exist. AC ultimately realizes that it has not yet combined all of its available data in every possible combination, and thus begins the arduous process of rearranging and combining every last bit of information it has gained throughout the eons and through its fusion with humanity. Eventually AC discovers the answer, but has nobody to report it to; the universe is already dead. It therefore decides to answer by demonstration, since that will also create someone to give the answer to. The story ends with AC's pronouncement,
Dramatic adaptations
;Planetarium shows
"The Last Question" was first adapted for the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University, featuring the voice of Leonard Nimoy, as Asimov wrote in his autobiography In Joy Still Felt.
