A manga version:
The Last Question
101–110 of 169 posts
Re: The Last Question
#102I read all of Asimov before age 12. Good old multivac.
He was still writing books when I was 12. Although I still regret buying the novel version of Nightfall. Short story was better
Re: The Last Question
#103You can find it here, it's an amazing story: https://ipfs.eternum.io/ipfs/QmSiaEmhLvFdzzvkBmJKtRDmZRNDpDt...
Thanks for sharing, nice list of some others that I'm unfamiliar with. Will add to my reading list :)
Re: The Last Question
#104One of my favorite shorts, Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu
https://gizmodo.com/read-ken-lius-amazing-story-that-swept-t...
Re: The Last Question
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rabbi recently on the Lex Fridman podcast told a joke that went (roughly) like Scientists come to God and say "OK God, we've had a lot of progress lately in synthetic biology, genetics, engineering, etc. and we're pretty sure we know how you did it." God says "Oh really?". "Yes. We'll create living creatures out of dirt to show that we can do just as you did with Adam." God says "Wow, fantastic!" So the scientist…
Did God create the substrate he exists in?
I don't think many models of divinity would consider this a well formed question because there would be nothing 'sub' (e,g under, beneath) divine order itself. The divine is often characterized as self-enduring, self-maintaining, and self-creating. This question is reasonable refutation of a God that is imagined to fundamentally be a 'person' who 'lives' somewhere though.
It's my feeling that the Hindu observation of infinite turtle dependence argues that the notion of divine dependence is ill-fated to begin with.
Re: The Last Question
#106If 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.
When I put together a list of the "best" SF shorts a while back by author, this was my choice for Asimov. (IMO I can make an argument for "Nightfall" but that's a novella and other things being equal I was prioritizing shorter works.) That said, Asimov has a lot of good short stories including quite a few of his robot stories.
please share your full list with us.
Re: The Last Question
#107A similarly thought-provoking short story, perhaps my favorite, is The Egg[1] by Andy Weir. [1]: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egg_(Weir_short_story)
I read the story many years ago, but failed to grasp its meaning. It seems to be piggybacking on themes of afterlife, karma, gods, and those typically are of interest to many. But, what kind of longer-lasting idea it tries to propose, that escapes me.
That’s a shame, to me it really was a thought-provoking piece.
Re: The Last Question
#108If 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.
There's the concept of the AI effect, where the goalposts for what is considered AI are continuously moved so that they no longer encapsulate what today's AI can do.
I wonder if the same thing applies to godhood. For thousands of years, humans have shifted the evolutionary path of other species. We create humans outside of the human body every day. We manipulate fundamental forces and create particles. For fun, we interact with virtual worlds full of creatures we made. We've even put life on other worlds.
Maybe our universe is just some greaterverse being's homework.
Re: The Last Question
#109This feels relevant: Roger Penrose - Why Did Our Universe Begin? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypjZF6Pdrws tl;dw: It is well known that the universe expands, tracing this back in time leads to the singularity called the Big Bang. But is it possible to ask for a "before" the beginning of time? What is time? Time is what we measure with clocks. What are clocks? Something that returns to the same state (say, a pendulu…
This brings questions. How the universe knows it’s “over”, or how the last BH knows it shouldn’t start a cycle yet? Sounds as if the universe was some database which compacts itself when a column becomes all-equal and then adds another one after seeing that there is too much E in zero/undef distance. Does that create more than one big bangs? (Since distances are undefined, nothing wrong with assuming anything from zero to just below +inf apart.)
Edit: I think we should see time only as a parameter and find out how any calculation could work without it. That would relax the past tense (what “was” before time) into something manageable (no linguistic analogy yet).
Re: The Last Question
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the issue is that Asimov uses "hyperspace" as a get-out-of-jail-free card for anything that seems to contradict physics. Faster than light travel? Possible through hyperspace. Infinitely powerful computers? Can exist in hyperspace.
Quite true, but that's not something unique to Asimov. Applied Phlebotinum [1] is a common device in Science Fiction whenever the science can't support a plot device required by the fiction (SF narratives are stories in the first place, after all). There's even a trope specifically for how hyperspace and subspace are used in that way.[2] [1] https://tropedia.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Applied_Phlebotinu... [2] https://…
Why would you link the the super ad-ridden and obnoxious fandom copy of a TV Tropes article?