Isaac Asimov: The Last Question

Posted by ColinWright 2 hours ago

Comments

Comment by CGMthrowaway 1 hour ago

>INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER

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

Comment by gwerbin 23 minutes ago

They can do it, it's just not "by default", they need to be prompted to do it. So at least the danger is manageable if you know what you're doing and how to prompt around it.

Comment by bargainbin 50 minutes ago

You’re absolutely right! I do have insufficient data for a meaningful answer. This is not an *insightful prediction* — it’s *Dunning-Kruger masquerading as qualified intelligence*

Comment by fragmede 12 minutes ago

Did a human write this?

Comment by croisillon 34 minutes ago

No Information before. No information after. This is not a failure — it's narcissism as a service.

Comment by jasongill 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by jihadjihad 1 hour ago

Agreed. Don't forget the "Can't send emails farther than 500 miles" one, too [0]:

0: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

Comment by rationalist 1 hour ago

More Magic:

https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html

Comment by nickt 31 minutes ago

I love this one. I thought it was old when I first read it, and today I realised that was 36 years ago!

Comment by xeonmc 49 minutes ago

Not quite tech or sci-fi, but for me it’s https://www.eternal-flame.org/library/oldlibrary/georgebusin...

Comment by IAmBroom 30 minutes ago

Is that the origin of the Sean Connery dragon movie, Dragonheart?

Comment by rouvax 56 minutes ago

For more reading, see also: https://web.archive.org/web/20250719141310/https://dbrgn.ch/...

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?

Comment by PaulHoule 1 hour ago

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

Comment by gwerbin 21 minutes ago

As usual, labor saving is only a good idea if the wealth created is distributed throughout society, not redirected to a small group of people.

Comment by sebg 1 hour ago

For those curious -> https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blac...

Comment by markus_zhang 1 hour ago

How about this one?

https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue4-8.h...

Comment by b3lvedere 1 hour ago

That was an awesome read. Thanks.

Comment by Toutouxc 42 minutes ago

For me it's "The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans", which is often quite problematic.

Comment by derwiki 39 minutes ago

I loved reading that. Why is it problematic?

Comment by JKCalhoun 18 minutes ago

Probably because actual people died.

Comment by cdelsolar 15 minutes ago

I am guessing because it takes hours to read.

Comment by rationalist 1 hour ago

Once I discovered that the SR-71 Ground Speed Check is most likely not true, it doesn't hold the same weight for me anymore.

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.

Comment by actionfromafar 1 hour ago

Don't tell me the "dreaded 7-engine approach" also isn't true!

Comment by rationalist 1 hour ago

Who knows, but there isn't a whole story with details behind it to make someone think is.

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.

Comment by CGMthrowaway 57 minutes ago

People will be reading this story for ten trillion years

Comment by triceratops 10 minutes ago

"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

Comment by jjice 42 minutes ago

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.

Comment by jimmydddd 16 minutes ago

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.

Comment by triceratops 7 minutes ago

He had an academic career too, becoming a tenured professor at age 35 at Boston University. Writing just paid better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov#Education_and_car...

Comment by us-merul 8 minutes ago

I looked this up on Wikipedia. It seems that he was working as an instructor (not a professor) of chemistry; since he was making more money as a writer during that time, he slowed down or stopped his research. Doesn’t seem to have been an intentional choice so much as how things happened to turn out.

Comment by triceratops 6 minutes ago

> he was working as an instructor (not a professor)

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."

Comment by ANTHONY6632 39 minutes ago

Totally agree, that ending sticks with you for a long time. Asimov had a way of making simple ideas feel massive.

Comment by breuleux 30 minutes ago

> 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.

Comment by shivaniShimpi_ 4 minutes ago

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

Comment by sebg 1 hour ago

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

Comment by Procrastes 59 minutes ago

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.

Comment by jjoonathan 39 minutes ago

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.)

Comment by monsieurbanana 30 minutes ago

I... Think you just spoiled me. Somehow I've managed to avoid all information about it so far, but now that you said it's like the last question...

It's on me for procrastinating playing the game for so long, it was bound to happen.

Comment by jjoonathan 22 minutes ago

"Similar" is doing substantial work. If this is your only clue, it is likely to mislead you for at least 50% of the game, and I strongly suspect you will have fun anyway :)

Comment by cdelsolar 14 minutes ago

this sorta comes up very very early in the game tho

Comment by antirez 19 minutes ago

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

Comment by hnthrowaway0315 6 minutes ago

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

Comment by quentindanjou 1 hour ago

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!

Comment by larrykluger 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by 0xmattf 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by throw_m239339 2 minutes ago

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

Comment by satvikpendem 12 minutes ago

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

Comment by moffers 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by shivaniShimpi_ 1 hour ago

the LLM parallel does hit different on this read multivac says insufficient data across ten trillion years and the whole story is basically if more compute and more data eventually gets you there. what's weird is the story answers yes, not on any timeframe that helps the people asking tho.

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

Comment by waltbosz 30 minutes ago

I feel like the software running multivac represents something vastly more advanced than today's LLM.

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.

Comment by mercer 59 minutes ago

maybe 42 was just the end of sequence token...

Comment by IAmBroom 15 minutes ago

My favorite "explanation" of that answer is that 6*9=42 in base 13.

God's numbering system is "unlucky".

Comment by baq 1 hour ago

It only takes understanding the exponential function and some imagination, right? Apparently an uncommon combination of traits in people ;)

Comment by OhMeadhbh 39 minutes ago

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.

Comment by bitshiftfaced 1 hour ago

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?

Comment by Arainach 1 hour ago

Ted Chiang is the greatest living science fiction short story writer I'm aware of, and ranks highly on my all time list.

Comment by Darkphibre 32 minutes ago

His short story "Understand" is just... amazing.

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...

Comment by jperoutek 28 minutes ago

I second this. Exhalation for some reason really resonates with me.

Comment by NetMageSCW 38 minutes ago

Have you tried Arthur Clarke? I would say he is close to Asimov in many ways, being from the same time.

For others who share some similarities, though with a greater emphasis on character and adventure, perhaps Hal Clement, Larry Niven or Robert L. Forward.

Comment by Esn024 30 minutes ago

I think Brian Daley's books have a somewhat similar feel as Asimov's, particularly "Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds" and its sequels.

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.

Comment by NickDouglas 1 hour ago

Try "The Illustrated Man" by Ray Bradbury, but skip the terrible frame story. The actual short stories are beautiful literature and canonical sci-fi.

Comment by NetMageSCW 39 minutes ago

As someone who loves the Big Three (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein) and have read a lot of SF, I pretty much despise Bradbury. There’s no science in his science fiction.

Comment by shivaniShimpi_ 1 hour ago

ted chiang if you haven't already. story of your life, exhalation, the lifecycle of software objects. same thing asimov does where the sci fi premise is really just a frame for a very human question. except chiang does it in like 30 pages and you feel it for a week

Comment by npilk 1 hour ago

It's not "sci fi" but you should read Borges' short stories, particularly from Ficciones.

You may have already read his story The Library of Babel: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...

Comment by phkahler 1 hour ago

>> But I've started wondering if maybe I just liked Asimov's writing in particular.

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.

Comment by sjg1729 38 minutes ago

I was also quite fond of Palimpsest by Stross. It’s a retelling of EoE but a more modern treatment (and the writing is quite a bit better, IMO)

Comment by jakeinspace 1 hour ago

Stanislaw Lem, if you can handle something a little more poetic and less strictly hard sci-fi.

Comment by robrain 1 hour ago

Becky Chambers - Wayfarer series and several enjoyable short stories/novellas. Low on blasters, high on sentient life in all its many forms.

Comment by boxed 1 hour ago

I mean.. a genre can't be all hits, that makes no sense :P

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

Comment by mwigdahl 11 minutes ago

Neal Stephenson's work is outstanding in my opinion, although some find it polarizing. My favorite of his is _Anathem_, followed closely by _Seveneves_.

Iain Banks's science fiction novels (mostly set in the Culture, but he does have others) are also great.

Comment by comicjk 1 hour ago

A Fire Upon The Deep is a fantastic novel for programmers to read, and I think the prequel A Deepness In The Sky is even better. There are some amazing old-school coding jokes in there, like that everyone thinks the universal time counter started at the first moon landing, but programmer archaeologists know it was really 15 megaseconds later.

Comment by rationalist 1 hour ago

The Expanse series starting with Leviathan Wakes.

(I second Ender's Game, The Martian, and Project Hail Mary.)

Comment by xeonmc 42 minutes ago

Though Dune is highly acclaimed for its concepts, I couldn’t quite get into it personally.

They’re just too dry for my tastes.

Comment by baq 1 hour ago

- Hyperion

Comment by arc_light 1 hour ago

[dead]

Comment by ANTHONY6632 40 minutes ago

I like the concept, has anyone tried this in production?

Comment by appplication 28 minutes ago

Running it now but don’t have sufficient data to make a recommendation yet

Comment by RajT88 46 minutes ago

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.

Comment by ghaff 37 minutes ago

You should. It's short and it's one of Asimov's best.

Comment by RajT88 2 minutes ago

I did! That is how I know the arc is similar.

Comment by butz 7 minutes ago

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."

Comment by grimgrin 1 hour ago

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!

Comment by zabzonk 1 hour ago

Comment by charv 2 hours ago

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

Comment by eschulz 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by jjoonathan 30 minutes ago

Outer Wilds, the video game, does a brilliant job expanding on this theme if you're hungry for more. "There's more to explore here."

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.

Comment by Aliyekta 1 hour ago

Claude Mythos

Comment by ramon156 1 hour ago

[reference] [reference]