Isaac Asimov on The David Letterman Show in 1980 In 1956, Isaac Asimov wrote a short story in a single sitting that begins in 2061, with two drunk engineers asking a room-sized computer whether the universe has to end. The computer can't answer. Neither can the next one, a few centuries later, or the one after that, or the planet-sized intelligence humans consult once they've spread across the galaxy. Every time somebody asks, the machine replies with the same line: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER. The story keeps jumping forward — billions of years at a time — until the stars are gone, humanity has merged with the machine, and there's nothing left except the question and whatever is still thinking about it. This is "The Last Question," which Asimov called his favorite thing he ever wrote, out of the 500-plus books he published. It ran in Science Fiction Quarterly in November 1956, and it's about 5,000 words, so you can read it in twenty minutes.…