The Last Question

"The Last Question" is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov, first published in Science Fiction Quarterly in November 1956. Asimov considered it his favorite of all his own works.

Told in seven vignettes spanning billions of years, the story follows humanity's recurring attempts to answer a single question: can entropy be reversed? It begins in 2061, when two technicians drunkenly pose the question to Multivac — a vast supercomputer that has just solved Earth's energy crisis. The story then leaps forward through the ages. Civilization spreads across galaxies, merges with its machines, and eventually transcends physical form entirely. Yet across all this time, the question goes unanswered. Every iteration of the computer, growing ever more powerful and abstract, can only respond: "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER." At the end of time, with the universe cold and dark and humanity long dissolved into a collective consciousness, the last mind poses the question one final time — then ceases to exist. Only the computer remains, alone in hyperspace, still working on the problem. When it finally finds the answer, there is no one left to hear it. So it does the only logical thing.

Few short stories attempt to cover several trillion years of history. Fewer still stick the landing.