HWM Singapore — May 2017

8,-2/

PICTURE

FAWCETT

E

ven the universe must come to an end someday.

“The Last Question,” a short story by Isaac

Asimov, follows a series of artiï cially intelligent

computers called the Multivac and its interactions with

humanity. Multivac helped man design ships, plot

trajectories to neighboring planets, and ï nally, even

harness the energy of the sun on a planet-wide scale.

There seems to be no problem that the increasingly

powerful Multivac can’t solve. But nothing is inï nite,

and successive generations of humanity, despite

having achieved immortality and transcended their

physical bodies, continue to ask Multivac the same

question.

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CAN THE

END OF THE UNIVERSE

BE PREVENTED?

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“Can entropy ever be reversed?”

Each time, the all-powerful supercomputer replies that

there is insufï cient data for a meaningful answer.

Finally, when the universe is in its death throes and

humanity has become a collective consciousness

comprising trillions upon trillions of ethereal minds,

they fuse with Multivac – now known as the Cosmic AC

• in what is effectively mankind’s end.

But AC remains, pondering the last question man ever

asked of it, and ï nally declares an answer, one that

raises interesting questions for both science and religion.

36 +:0 | MAY 2017