His futuristic abilities are astounding, he predicted basically, Google on our phones, and the scaling of nanotechnology. It was perhaps this constant contact with arms racing that made Asimov so able to imagine the future. He almost had to attend the nuclear tests of the Bikini Atoll, and once he had gained recognition as a writer was courted by NARPA, which whom he decided to have no involvement. At young age, he was not exempt from service like he should have only due to a bureaucratic mistake. Throughout his life, Asimov struggled with his relationship with the U.S. We can do that without making it too complicated, that’s partially the beauty of Asimov’s writing isn’t it? How precise and simple his writing is? Great, but what can we say about this text now, 60 years after its publication date, and closer to the (science-) fictitious date where the story begins? We can extrapolate it with three time moments, how it plays in history, how it applies to our present, and to try to redefine it given what we know towards the future.
Finally, at the end of time, when the computer has acquired every last bit of information about the cosmos (read: all that is, or ever was, or ever will be (Carl Sagan, Cosmos S01E01), we find ourselves right at the beginning. As the story intervals some factors are subject to change and some remain the same: The human lives’ characteristics are variable and so are the human and computer capabilities, but the fundamental relationships are repeated (humans ask themselves “what happens when we exhaust all energy and space? And can we do anything about it?” and the information super-computer up until the end admits to failing to come up with an answer. And the final answer can be taken in many directions, and although biblical, even to me, a heated atheist, provides a secular meaning. The story was famously selected by the author as his own favorite an opinion shared by many of his fans as well. Asimov takes a vertiginous leap at answering this final question and finds a solution fitting to the magnitude of problem. It is a bold question (Mary Shelley’s words), one upon which, without a doubt, history’s most brilliant minds of astrophysics pondered endlessly. Throughout the story, the last question “can entropy be reversed?” (or more simply put “will the universe ever come to an end?”) is asked by humans to their computers throughout infinity, until only the machine and the question remain. In this short story, Asimov presented the problematic of asking systems of information about the limits of the universe itself. The last question was asked, half in jest, by Isaac Asimov sometime in the year 1956.
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