A Univac computer at the Census Bureau.
The most wicked show I ever saw was not in a theatre or on TV. It was at a planetarium. Highly touted in the press, the presentation was Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Last Question.”
The question, asked of a colossal computer named Multivac, was whether or not entropy could be reversed (and life continue). Multivac answered, “INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.”
Over trillions of years mankind fills not only our home galaxy but all the galaxies of the universe. Future generations ask the question again and again of Multivac’s successors which have more and more intelligence. Before the last man fuses with Multivac which has now become Cosmic-AC, he asks the question again and AC replies, “THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.”
The story ends this way:
The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.
And AC said, “LET THERE BE LIGHT!”
And there was light –
Humans have a tendency to make gods of created things and of what their hands have made. This tendency is aptly illustrated in Asimov’s story and in reader’s/viewer’s reactions to it. Despite gross scientific inaccuracies,* the story receives raves across the web. Readers revel in its blasphemy. One declared “I have found a new religion.” Some acknowledge that seeing this show led them to embrace atheism.
In “The Thinking Machine,” an Asimov essay which corresponds to this story, he declared that the only difference between a computer and the human brain is complexity. Evidently he also believes that the only difference between God the Creator and a computer is an even higher level of complexity. In his “wisdom,” he reached the pantheistic religious position that the totality of the universe itself is god.
I consider “The Last Question” the most wicked show I’ve seen because it directly, willfully defies the first and second commandments, “You shall have no other gods before me,” and “you shall not make for yourself an idol.” Fancy throwing away faith on untenable hypotheses such as hyperspace and the non-existence of spirit.
*For example, Asimov declares all galaxies are the same and inhabitable; they are not; and at the rate they are stretching apart many will not even be visible from ours on a time scale far shorter than his story encompasses.
