“The question came about as a result of a five dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way…” – Isaac Asimov

It is nearly an obligation of our human consciousness to, at one point or several, individually attempt to wrangle with the “big” questions: What is the meaning of life? Is there a God? What happens after death? How does it all end? Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question stands as one of the greatest short stories for its profound exploration of this last example. By utilizing the progress of scientific understanding from the past century to give clearer language and significance to the question, Asimov provided an iconic story about humanity’s attempt to comprehend the end of everything. 

The Last Question is a short story published in 1956 by Isaac Asimov, first appearing in the magazine Science Fiction Quarterly. Its length – just shy of 4,500 words – is no reflection of its ambition. Asimov set out with a thesis and goal, as he writes in his introduction, of wanting to “tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story…”

The story itself features seven distinct eras, wherein different people (and later, something far beyond human) address the Multivac – a supercomputer-to-end-all-supercomputers. It changes name and form throughout time – but its function remains relatively constant. It is fed data, is “self-adjusting and self-correcting,” and has evolved from largely solving mere flight trajectory problems to being able to “answer deeper questions more fundamentally…”  Its processing ability grows alongside the flow of time, evolving from the Multivac to the Microvac, to the Galactic AC, the Universal AC, the Cosmic AC, until finally “Man’s last mind fused and only AC existed — and that in hyperspace.”

The last question itself, “asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061…” is this: “How can entropy be reversed?” The question comes about organically from two attendants of the machine who begin debating the problem of entropy and the meaning of forever:

“Oh, hell, just about forever. Till the sun runs down, Bert.”

“That’s not forever.”

After exhausting the conversation to the best of their (inebriated) ability, they decide to consult the Multivac. When asked the last question, the Multivac responds – “INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.” Asimov’s story then takes us across exponentially increasing oceans of time, wherein the Multivac is asked the last question again and again, and despite millennia to learn and evolve more and more, its answer is the same – until the conclusion.

Asimov called this work “by far my favorite story of all those I have written.” It has enjoyed considerable fame – so much so that people will often consider any “greatest short story” list incomplete if The Last Question is absent. Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant, and Wolfram Alpha, an online computational knowledge engine, both quote the Multivac/AC when queried “How can entropy be reversed?”

What makes the story so exceptional? With the relatively recent discovery of entropy, the author made the brilliant connection to translate “How does it all end?” into “How can entropy be reversed?” – that is, the latter question is a logical evolution of the former, rephrased based on the progress of scientific knowledge. By translating this into a narrative, one that showcases humanity’s attempt across eons to understand the nature of the universe and its finitude across time, Asimov gave form and feeling to a fundamental question of existence.

But its ending and conclusion is not without hope. Long after humanity’s disappearance, after matter, energy, space and time end, the AC completes its analysis and discovers how entropy can be reversed – and so the story concludes with a creation myth of its own, utilizing a line from the Old Testament – “And AC said, “LET THERE BE LIGHT!” And there was light –”