The Last Question

Isaac Asimov wrote over 500 books and 90,000 letters in his lifetime. He’s considered one of the three most influential science fiction writers of all time. Of everything he wrote, his favorite was a short story called The Last Question.

The premise is simple: humanity keeps returning to a supercomputer to ask the same question—can it solve the problem of entropy, the inevitable increase in disorder that will eventually cause the universe to run down?

(I won't spoil the ending.)

What stays with me is the returning. Civilization after civilization, across billions of years, humanity keeps coming back to the same computer with the same question. The computer never has an answer. They come back anyway.

I used to think the story (perhaps our story) was about survival and persistence. But as I get older, I think it’s about something smaller: we get to try. Of everything in the universe we can see, we might be the only thing that gets to try. That’s not nothing.

And somehow, it all feels less deterministic—even when the odds are almost zero.