The narrative arc of Isaac Asimov's famous short story ‘The Last Question’ (1956) spans trillions of years of future-history in about a dozen pages, unfolding in the obsessive repetition of a single, angstridden conversation between successive generations of human beings and an increasingly godlike Ur-computer. In its mantra-like recitation and re-recitation of an unanswerable riddle, it lays bare the nagging cognitive dissonance at the heart of the extropian project, illuminating what is at stake in the various visions of technological Singularity we have encountered thus far: the paradox of final ends.

The initial setup to the story is a classic pulp utopia, typical of the Campbellian techno-optimism that characterized sf's own Golden Age: humankind has built a computer with computational powers infinitely greater than its own, which proceeds to solve the world's problems as swiftly and effortlessly as if it were balancing a checkbook. With staggering efficiency and tool-like subservience, the machine performs the cognitive heavy-lifting that facilitates first the optimization and fine-tuning of terrestrial civilization and thence its expansion into space, leaving the hominids free to kick back and contemplate their navels – a newfound leisure that sits uncomfortably when they inevitably get around to pondering the long-term future. Time and again, such ruminations end in the same impasse: no matter how far we advance, ‘Entropy must increase.’ The stars are slowly but surely burning out, and eventually – not for many billions of years, certainly, but all the same – their life-giving energy will have dissipated completely into waste heat, abolishing the necessary conditions not just for biological existence, but for materiality itself. At the limits of their mammalian cognitive capabilities, the humans turn to the superior intelligence of the machine for answers, but in each episode the ‘last’ question – ‘How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?’ – is pronounced unanswerable.

The story's repetitive structure allows Asimov to develop his theme gradually, expanding the scope and layering in new ramifications with each extrapolative iteration, but always returning to the same anxious refrain. In the first scene, for example, a pair of middle-aged, mid-twenty-first-century technicians celebrate the computer's first great achievement – harnessing the atomic power of the sun to provide a virtually infinite supply of free energy – but soon find themselves wondering what will happen on the distant day when that power is exhausted.