The Last Question

An existential crisis in nine pages. I've read this before, but reading it again, I remember why it stayed with me for so many years. Man asks, at times, "Can entropy be reversed?" We don't know, but mostly we avoid thinking too long or too closely about it. To think too long about the inevitable decay of everything in existence is acknowledge, perhaps, the futility of our lives. We know what follows from it: I will die, everybody I will ever know will die, and eventually there will be nothing left to show that we were ever really here at all.

Or perhaps things aren't quite that. The ending is ambiguous - deliberately so. Entropy is reversed at precisely the moment when mankind goes extinct. Perhaps the VAC provides us with an answer to the 'birth' of our universe, perhaps this is the eternal return Nietzsche spoke of: an unending cycle of birth, growth, decay, death, and rebirth. The name of this 'VAC' isn't really the important part, it's that at a certain degree of perfection, this machine created by man becomes indistinguishable from God. And as the story ends, the machine said: "Let there be light!" And there was light. Perhaps this is one answer to the timeless question: Why is there something rather than nothing? An attempt to address this theological-existential question through the medium of science-fiction.

A new universe created, perhaps. Mankind extinguished in any meaningful sense, torn from corporeality and transformed into the pure virtuality of this VAC singularity-machine. No one left to whom the VAC can give its long-awaited answer, its only option is to demonstrate that it has an answer. But there's no one really left to see it. We certainly won't. At this point in the history of the human race, and of the history of our universe, there really is "insufficient data to provide a meaningful answer." And probably by the time we find an answer, whether we can or can't reverse this process, 'humanity' will be just as unrecognisable as Asimov (probably correctly) suspects. It isn't clear that 'humanity' will mean anything at all, transformed as it is into pure consciousness, a virtual singularity-machine. Plenty here for the transhumanists to mull over.