In Asimov’s short story “The Last Question” we get to see the evolution of the supercomputer, Multivac, from a “humble” super computer, to becoming a universal ethereal super computer that resides in hyperspace. The short story was animated using Midjourney and Premiere Pro, and it was a interesting and fun challenge to try to animate or visualize this evolution of a computer. Going from a cavernous super computer resembling a modern data center, to a ghostly entity that lives in hyperspace. Here is my visualization of this evolution:
Animated version (Using Midjourney) of Isaac Asimov’s famous short story. Broken up into 6 chapters, each with a different visual style, the video is the complete short story which covers the entirety of time and space. Short story is known for the vastness covered in such a short narrative. How may entropy be reversed? How long would it take Multivac take to arrive at a answer for this last question?
Short story is broken up into 5 different chapters, each with a distinct visual motif: Chapter 1 – Adell and Lupov (Anime, ukiyo-e style)
Chapter 3 – VJ and Galactic AC (Film noir) (Music: Gerudo Valley – Malcura)
Chapter 4 – Zee Prime (Ancient Mediterranean) (Music: The Best is yet to come – Metal Gear solid)
Chapter 5 – The End of time – (Signalis / Ethereal style) (Music: Die Toteninsel – Signalis)
I had a ton of fun making this video. I did get the interesting mention in the comments on Youtube regarding that i was using AI generating imagery to animate a video about a super computer gaining sentience, adding a meta level to the video. Thought that was really interesting.
If for some reason you’d like to take the story in via vertical format, you can see all of the shorts from the video that have been published so far:
Entropy is one of what I consider a mystery of the universe (along with Dark Matter and Dark Energy). Entropy itself is not a mystery, but rather why does it only ever increase? And why was the Big Bang a moment of tremendously low entropy? How did entropy reverse itself? Entropy reversing is the central theme to Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Last Question” (You can read it here: https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf)
In the short story, humanity rises, falls and transcend all without being able to figure out how did entropy reverse itself, even with the help of the super computer Multivac. Multivac started off as a super computer, but as the story continues, it becomes a transcendent universe computational entity, that once humanity has faded, is able to figure out, Why did entropy reverse itself at the beginning of time.
Entropy is defined as: “Entropy is a thermodynamic quantity that measures the amount of disorder or randomness in a system. It is a measure of the energy dispersal in a system. Low entropy means that the system is ordered, while high entropy means the system is disordered.”
In short, you can think of it as a measure of how “spread out” energy is in the universe. At the beginning of time, it was concentrated, at the end of time, energy will be evenly spread out across the universe.
Taco Banana 