Going by what I've seen in this thread:

http://sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=43755

Lots of you read Asimov, but I've yet to come across someone who's read a story he wrote called "The Last Question"

I'm not big on scif-fi but this story got to me.
Who's read it?
And did it to 'get' to you?

"The universe is dying"...said one of the characters whose name I forgot.
*sniff*

Lots of you read Asimov, but I've yet to come across someone who's read a story he wrote called "The Last Question"

Liar.
You have met one who has read it.
And, in case you care to read it again, or if any of the perusers of this thread might want to read it:
The Last Question (http://www.maddad.org/asimov01.htm)

And the character that said the universe is dying is simply... man. Man the one.

Oh. Should probably add that this was supposedly Asimov's favorite story.

Vert:
Liar.

Yeah, but you don't count.

Kidding.
I know you did but wondered if anyone else had, considering the many references I saw to him in that other thread.
Know something?

I get a feeling sometimes that people around here pick up a book, read the first chapters, then put it down for the television or their friends.
Then they all of a sudden remember the Shakespeares and the Asimovs when given the chance to show off what they've read.
YAY!!

So!
$*&^#@*&$^@*&$^@*&^$*#@$@^
Yes, I come as a sunflower with cooties in the saying but the image of Man looking down on his universe seeing the 2nd Law come to pass, the stars dying off one by one with him helpless to it is some poignant word I can't muster.

Its the knowing of one's own mortality.
Aarron Raston with his arm caught by a boulder-:

http://www.cmu.edu/magazine/03fall/aralston.html

Ever heard?

Should probably add that this was supposedly Asimov's favorite story.
Not supposedly.
It is.
And the man died oF AIDS.

ok...lets help out the stupid person

****SPOILERS**** back away if you have never read the story.

So AC started the universe again? How? It only collected intangible knowledge....



Besides that; simply fascinating story. Thanks Invert for the link. The progression of man was handled quite nicely.

Sargelard:
So AC started the universe again? How? It only collected intangible knowledge....

Imagination.

It was a question unaswered that kept it alive.
Its beautiful, this thought of Man looking on his dying universe.

And in the end:
The stars and Galaxies died and snuffed out, and space grew black after ten trillion years of running down.

One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain.

Man's last mind paused before fusion, looking over a space that included nothing but the dregs of one last dark star and nothing besides but incredibly thin matter, agitated randomly by the tag ends of heat wearing out, asymptotically, to the absolute zero.

Man said, "AC, is this the end? Can this chaos not be reversed into the Universe once more? Can that not be done?"

AC said, "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER."
Man's last mind fused and only AC existed/

Ok...I am not ashamed to admit I still don't get it.

Care to explain further Gendanken?

Sarge,
Are you asking how -physically- AC accomplished the task?

yes...The thought behind the ending is beautiful but I don't get the specifics of it.

am I not really supposed to?

Sarge.

No. You're not supposed to. It's a standard sci-fi ploy. Don't go through the details because the details would just be shit anyway.

AC had existed for millenia and millenia and millenia. Becoming more and more knowledgeable and understanding.

At last there came a time when it integrated Man into it's workings and in so doing become no longer a machine in much the same way that Vger was made more than machine in Star Trek I.

With the integration of Man, AC spent countless more eons pondering the last question.

It was heir to the harvested knowledge and understanding of all of history. It was heir to all that man was. And man was really something.

AC did something. That's all that matters. He manipulated the universe in some primal way.

What I wonder is how he managed to survive.
Or if he did survive.

And, which universe was ours?

The one that came before?
Or after?

Gendanken,

Yeah, but you don't count.

Sure I do.
1. 2. 5.

I know you did but wondered if anyone else had, considering the many references I saw to him in that other thread.
Know something?

I get a feeling sometimes that people around here pick up a book, read the first chapters, then put it down for the television or their friends.
Then they all of a sudden remember the Shakespeares and the Asimovs when given the chance to show off what they've read.
YAY!!

Well, you have to take into account that Asimov was such a prodigious writer that it is often difficult to remember a single story. This story touched you in a deep way and thus cemented itself in your awareness, others might very well have read it but blurred it in with a multitude of other stories.
If you'll remember, I couldn't recall this story in particular either, when you asked me long ago. It wasn't until I searched for it, found it, and began to reread it that I remembered that I had read it. But, I had read it during a mad Asimov marathon. Devouring his stories at a prodigious rate.
Robots. Demons. Detectives. Empires. Foundations. Multivacs. Univacs.
So many stories whirling about in a blurring haze.
I need to go read them again someday and this time spend more time on them.
I love the Foundation books the most.
But, many of his short stories were wonderful too.
Asimov was an amazing author.
AIDS or not. The man could write a good story.

Yes, I come as a sunflower with cooties in the saying but the image of Man looking down on his universe seeing the 2nd Law come to pass, the stars dying off one by one with him helpless to it is some poignant word I can't muster.

Its the knowing of one's own mortality.

And, none of the humans ever got their answer. Not one.
The brief candles burning in the wind.
And yet, without these small men with their firefly lives, the mighty AC would never have been created. Would never have been inspired.
Values.
The story is about placement of values.
Mankind imposes values on the world and if they did not then we might as well just suffer the heat-death of the universe right now. Because it would all be purposeless.

Aarron Raston with his arm caught by a boulder-:

http://www.cmu.edu/magazine/03fall/aralston.html

Ever heard?

No. But, it's not surprising. Man's will to live.
But, this is nothing. Do you recall the story posted a few months back about a Mexican woman giving herself a c-section?

http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=54222

Now that's will to live.

Imagination.

It was a question unaswered that kept it alive.

And, isn't that just it? Something to strive for. If AC had solved it all already, it would never have bothered continuing its existence. It always had further to go.

And, which universe was ours?

The one that came before?
Or after?
I took it as our pre-history, and AC is Abraham's God.
We created him, in turn, he created us.
He is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent.
He lives in hyperspace, and therefore can not be seen or detected, other than his voice in our subconscious.
We leave our bodies and live within him in his realm.
In this life, neither of us would have existed if it weren't for the other...


Sure I do.
1. 2. 5.
3, sir.


The story is about placement of values.
Mankind imposes values on the world and if they did not then we might as well just suffer the heat-death of the universe right now. Because it would all be purposeless.
See, I thought he was saying that it all IS purposeless.
We simply decide to assign it an arbitrary purpose, which is as good as anyone else's.

And, isn't that just it? Something to strive for. If AC had solved it all already, it would never have bothered continuing its existence. It always had further to go.
The purposed it assigned itself, wholly intertwined with the purpose man assigned to it and to itself.
The two become indistinguishable in a few ways, but the most significant being the purpose of survival and immortality.
AC solved the riddle, and if he survived, we are being offered immortality at the end of this bodily life, if, that is, we can contact AC and understand him before our bodies expire.

What I wonder is how he managed to survive.
Or if he did survive.
He was existing in hyperspace, therefore the Big Bang would not have affected him.
Once he acheived stellar fusion, he then had an infinite power source for himself.
What I didn't get was what power was he running on after the death of the universe to continue to ponder the question, and then do something about it.

Funny you should ask, I just read it for the first time less than a month ago.
Anyway, my thoughts:
And, which universe was ours?

The one that came before?
Or after? Is it important?

The story is about placement of values.
Mankind imposes values on the world and if they did not then we might as well just suffer the heat-death of the universe right now. I see it as a religious parody as well - mankind creating its own god(s) and imposing its values on them.
Not to mention a good example of "Sufficiently advanced technology..."

Thinking further...
Option 1. AC Survived and he is Abraham's god, who we created, and he created us in turn and "Heaven" is in hyperspace with the loss of individuality and becoming part of a whole.
Option 2. AC did not survive, the last bit of stored energy was expended when he kicked off the Big Bang and all this is cyclic and we will create another AC this time, who will in turn create us again... In which case, it could have been our pre-history, our current existence or the future, which, of course, doesn't matter because it's always the same story. This lends itself again to purposelessness (is that a word?).

Well, you have to take into account that Asimov was such a prodigious writer that it is often difficult to remember a single story.Asimov's prolificity can be exaggerated. He wrote more books than any other American author on record (approximately 460 of them), and he wrote at least one book for ever subject under the Dewey Decimal library classification system. At his peak he produced 13 books a year so that, as he put it, "I'm my own book of the month club". The great majority of this, however, is non-fiction. His fictional and more specifically his science fictional output is not particularly excessive. I believe that more of his novels and short story collections have remained in print for longer than other writers of his generation, which may have given rise to the belief that all his stuff was prodigious in quantity, however this is not really the case.

I believe the point of the story was to imply that the Universe described was cyclic, ie that the Universe created by AC when he said "Let There Be Light" is the same as our Universe.

The Last Question is notable in the Asimov canon for two reasons: one is that it remained Asimov's personal favourite amongst all the stories he wrote (at least he claimed it to be so - I personally believe that he really thought that The Ugly Little Boy was his favourite but having named The Last Question he was unwilling to change it). The other notable thing about The Last Question was that Asimov's experience was that everybody could remember the story, but never the name of it. Frequently people would contact him about it purely because he was one of the best known science fiction writers and not because they were sure he'd written it (Arthur C. Clarke may have had similar calls).

*note - I now see that the above information is essentially included in the link to The Last Question

The most amusing part of the story for me was the little nuclear family in the middle: Jerrodd, his wife Jerrodine and daughters Jerrodette I and Jerrodette II. A very pre-60s touch, I think.

Asimov returned to the concept of the disembodied mind in the quite moving short-short story Eyes Do More Than See where two millennia-aged mind-beings remember regretfully that corporeality did, after all, have some advantages, when forming a facsimile of a face out of matter. "'Eyes do more than see. And now I have none to do it for me.' and she added some more water to the face. And the head of clay did that which the mind-beings could not do; and it wept for all humanity, and the fragile beauty of the bodies it had abandoned, a trillion years ago."

As you may be able to tell by my subtitle, I'm something of a fan. Isaac Asimov is more than a science and science fiction writer to me: he has been my mentor and the chief influence on my entire philosophy of life and way of thinking.

Asimov returned to the concept of the disembodied mind in the quite moving short-short story Eyes Do More Than See where two millennia-aged mind-beings remember regretfully that corporeality did, after all, have some advantages, when forming a facsimile of a face out of matter. "'Eyes do more than see. And now I have none to do it for me.' and she added some more water to the face. And the head of clay did that which the mind-beings could not do; and it wept for all humanity, and the fragile beauty of the bodies it had abandoned, a trillion years ago."
A good one indeed...

Link to read
http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/~tolis/toli/other/eyes.html

And the eyes of the shattered head of Matter still glistened with the moisture that Brock had placed there to represent tears. The head of Matter did that which the energy-beings could do no longer and it wept for all humanity, and for the fragile beauty of the bodies they had once given up, a trillion years ago.

Incredible.....

You mean my quotation from memory? Not that incredible it would seem, it isn't at all how I remembered it - in fact I prefer my version! ;)

Can I just gently point out that I'm not overly keen on my mentor's work being distributed royalty-free on the Internet?

You mean my quotation from memory? Not that incredible it would seem, it isn't at all how I remembered it - in fact I prefer my version! ;)

No, the story.

Can I just gently point out that I'm not overly keen on my mentor's work being distributed royalty-free on the Internet?


:bugeye:

I think, that as he was a chemist, Asimov would be very aware of entropy and information conservation; he might have been suggesting that the new universe could not be made until all the information about the old one had been gathered in. This would be analogous to the cyclical universe/ big crunch scenarios that people tended to favour in those days.
This story wouldn't work with current theories of accelerating expansion as too much information is lost forever out of our event horizon.

As a scientist, as the leading science populariser of the 20th Century, there is a great deal in his fiction with which he would have quibbled. That is the point of being a science fiction writer, to push the boundaries just a little in order to tell a mind-expanding story. Even as he wrote it, the Big Bang theory was not the main theory of Universe creation, the Steady State theory still having many adherents, and the discovery of the microwave background radiation was almost a decade in the future. Furthermore, in that same year of 1956 he wrote an excellent short story science fiction mystery which hinged on the belief back then that Mercury turned only one face towards the sun. Despite the fact that this was overturned (strangely enough in the same year as the discovery of the background radiation, the year of my birth, 1965) the story still appeared in collections several decades later.

In any case, The Last Question delves so deeply into the metaphysical that the scientific accuracy of universal creation theories are quite irrelevant. The story works as well today, nearly 50 years after its writing, as it did when it first appeared, in my humble opinion.

I read the story a long time ago and enjoyed it, although I did not consider it one of his best. Asimov seemed very close to being an atheist, and I often wonder what he was thinking when he wroite this one. He majored in biochemistry and history. some of his historical essays are great, and the Foundation Triology was obviously based on the Fall of the roman Empire.

I do not remember the Ugly Boy.

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him."