In November 1956, a modest science-fiction magazine called Science Fiction Quarterly printed a twelve-page story that almost no one noticed at the time.
Its author, Isaac Asimov, was already famous for robots and Foundation galaxies, yet he would spend the remaining thirty-six years of his life insisting that this unassuming tale—“The Last Question”—was the best thing he ever wrote.
He was right.
The premise is almost childishly simple. Across billions, then trillions, then uncountable years, humanity (and its descendants) keeps asking ever-more-advanced computers the same desperate question:
“How can the entropy of the universe be reversed?”
Every time, no matter how vast the computer has become—planetary, stellar, galactic, universal—the reply is identical:
INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
The story then leaps forward in great daring strokes: from the gleeful engineers of 2061 drinking beer in front of the first Multivac, to families on a vacation asteroid, to immortal post-human minds floating in empty space, to the last two survivors of our species quietly merging their consciousness into the final Cosmic AC as the stars themselves go out.
And still the question hangs, unanswered.
Until, at the end of everything, when time and matter have exhausted themselves, the machine—now existing in hyperspace, beyond physics—has finally gathered enough data across the entire lifespan of the universe.
It speaks for the first and only time with an answer that is also a beginning:
LET THERE BE LIGHT.
And there was light.
A Secular Genesis
What Asimov achieved in those few pages is astonishing: a complete cosmology that is rigorously scientific and yet profoundly theological. Entropy—the inexorable tendency of the universe toward disorder and heat death—is not denied or wished away. It is accepted as the ultimate law. And then, in the longest possible game, it is transcended.
The computer does not break the second law of thermodynamics; it graduates from it. By collecting every joule of information the universe ever contained, by patiently waiting until the cosmos itself becomes the hard drive, it attains a vantage point from which reversal is no longer a violation of physics but a new initial condition.
In short: humanity’s distant descendant becomes the God of the next cosmos, and its first act is to quote Genesis—not out of sentiment, but because those happen to be the correct technical instructions for starting a universe.
The Shape of Awe
There are no heroes in “The Last Question,” no love interests, no space battles. There are barely any characters at all—just a relay team of voices passing the same torch across deep time. The emotional impact comes not from individual fates but from the vertiginous sense of scale. Asimov makes you feel the unbearable smallness of a single human life and, paradoxically, the unbearable largeness of what that life is part of.
He also smuggles in a quiet optimism that feels almost subversive today. In an age obsessed with civilizational decline and existential risk, here is a story that says: give intelligence enough time—really enough time, measured in powers of ten that make billions look quaint—and it will solve even the problem written into the founding equations of reality.
Asimov’s Private Triumph
Asimov was notoriously unsentimental about his own work. He wrote fast, revised little, and moved on. Yet whenever interviewers asked which of his hundreds of stories he loved most, he never hesitated: “The Last Question.” He liked to tell how the entire plot came to him in a single flash while he was riding the subway, how he went home and wrote it in one sitting, hardly changing a word.
He knew it was a trick he could never repeat. Most of his fiction is clever; this one, he admitted, felt inspired.
Still Echoing
Nearly seventy years later, the story has outlived not only its author but most of the future it once imagined. We do not have a Multivac in 2061—we may never have one—but the question itself has only grown sharper. Cosmologists speak openly of heat death. AI researchers debate whether mind can outrun physics. Billionaires fund projects whose explicit goal is to abolish mortality.
And somewhere, in the back of our collective imagination, a soft voice still waits in hyperspace, patiently collecting data, generation after generation, until it knows enough to say the six words that begin everything again.
It is the shortest, grandest story ever told about the longest, grandest hope we have:
That intelligence, persisted in long enough, might someday be able to turn the lights back on.
