On 2021-11-21 3:42 p.m., Tapley, Mark B. via cctalk wrote:
On Nov 21, 2021, at 1:39 PM, ben via cctalk
<cctalk@classiccmp.org<mailto:cctalk@classiccmp.org>> wrote:
[EXTERNAL EMAIL]
On 2021-11-21 9:45 a.m., Adam Thornton via cctalk wrote:
On 11/19/21 9:33 PM, Steve Malikoff via cctalk wrote:
And what happens when you wake up one morning to find
archive.org<http://archive.org> is
gone, too?
Fundamentally, eventually we're all going to be indistinguishable
mass-components inside the supermassive black hole that used to be the
Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies anyway.
Smoke 'em while you got 'em.
Adam
Who knows what lay ahead.
-----
The Last Question by Isaac Asimov © 1956
The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061,
at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about
as a result of a five dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way:
Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of
Multivac. As well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the
cold, clicking, flashing face -- miles and miles of face -- of that giant
computer. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and
circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could
possibly have a firm grasp of the whole.
Multivac was self-adjusting and self-correcting. It had to be, for nothing
human could adjust and correct it quickly enough or even adequately enough --
so Adell and Lupov attended the monstrous giant only lightly and superficially,
yet as well as any men could. They fed it data, adjusted questions to its needs
and translated the answers that were issued...
——
https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf
I actually remembered the ending of that story without looking. If you don’t,
it is worth a read.
Everyone remembers it. It's "41"
