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Deus ex machina is usually a literary hack but Asimov gets away with it by taking it seriously.
It's a literary hack now , but it wasn't when he wrote this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina#Ancient_critic...
Deus ex machina is usually a literary hack but Asimov gets away with it by taking it seriously.
If you haven’t read it before, don’t read the Wikipedia summary; read the actual story. It’s easy to google and pretty short. Isaac Asimov said it was his favorite story he’d written. He imagines the entire history of the future of humanity, to the end of time, in a few pages. Really a marvelous story.
Damn it, I wish I read this comment before I read the summary. I had chills at the end. Maybe I should read some Asimov...
If it takes place in the same universe as "The Last Question", you could argue it has a bit of a "Roko's basilisk" flavor.
If you haven’t read it before, don’t read the Wikipedia summary; read the actual story. It’s easy to google and pretty short. Isaac Asimov said it was his favorite story he’d written. He imagines the entire history of the future of humanity, to the end of time, in a few pages. Really a marvelous story.
It’s an atheist’s most religious dream to think of becoming one’s own creator. It’s nonsense, of course, but it definitely blew my mind reading it as a child. What set the parameters that the ultimate computer must work within? The ultimate computer can reverse entropy, but it can’t make its own reality. There are limits to the power of knowledge.
Evolution is slow enough that there was never one point at which we suddenly came into being. First we were energy, then we were energy forming into chemicals, then we were chemicals forming into chemicals with rigid structures, then we were chemicals with rigid structures forming more complex structures, etc, until we got to here. Each iteration creates the next iteration, constantly, always. We are always giving birth to ourselves with a teeny tiny change. There is no distinction between a human being and a gas cloud except a couple billion years of iteration.
Since we are always creating ourselves, and whatever created the universe also created us, then we probably created the universe, and are the universe, and are creating it still. We are the creator and the created. It's mobius bagels all the way down.
(Read the original first though.)
If you haven’t read it before, don’t read the Wikipedia summary; read the actual story. It’s easy to google and pretty short. Isaac Asimov said it was his favorite story he’d written. He imagines the entire history of the future of humanity, to the end of time, in a few pages. Really a marvelous story.
Maybe this is a comfort.
This is one of the short stories that that has stuck with me for life. Highly recommend reading it.
Edit: I actually learned of the story from a HN submission years ago. It has been discussed here many times: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=the+last+question
I saw it at the Fels Planetarium of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia apparently in 1973 when I was 8 years old and always remembered it and even kept thinking about it every once in a while.