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Stars

Throughout "The Last Question," stars parallel humanity's inevitable decline and the brevity of life. As humans learn to harness power from the stars, they are able to travel to new planets (and eventually new galaxies) to satisfy population growth and human expansion rates and to prolong humanity's survival. However, science and technology, while able to develop sunpower units that last billions of years, cannot permanently immortalize a star just like they cannot immortalize the human race. At each stage, humans obsess over the possibility of  reversing stars' deaths, reflecting their fixation on saving humanity from its inevitable end. Adell and Lupov focus on the Sun's limited lifespan. VJ-23X and MQ-17J discuss the idea that sunpower units are exhausted frequently and energy requirements are only increasing, suggesting that humanity will run out of stars to power its intergalactic expansion. In the following scene, Zee Prime is devastated to learn of the loss of the Sun and desperately begins creating his own stars to replace the dying ones. This obsession with preserving humanity, mirrored in the fixation on the stars' survival, is why humanity poses various versions of "the last question" during every single phase of human existence.

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