Ah, one of my favorite authors, Arthur C. Clarke. Well, in 2012 the von Neumann machines were used to increase the density of Jupiter to fusion point, creating Lucifer, the solar system's second star, in order that the life on Europa might have a more stable source of heat to evolve in than the mercurial hotspots on the ocean bottom created by Jupiter's tidal forces. This is why human beings must ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE, so they do not interfere with the process of advancement to civilisation as arranged by the mysterious monolith-controlling aliens (who have energy bodies like Dave Bowman has at the end of *2001* [who by the way becomes incorporated with the energy body of HAL to become Halman after 2010] but who used to have spaceship bodies like Rama in Clarke's *Rama* series). For those who enjoyed the films, I highly recommend the book series, it is excellent.
But perhaps a better literary comparison is Isaac Asimov's short story *The Last Question*, the eponymous question being "Will we [humans] ever reverse entropy?". In the story, we have a series of vignettes of a human asking a computer the question, from engineers asking it of a huge supercomputer on Earth (contemporary to the time of writing) to a family asking it of a starship they are living on to a pair of transgalactic (energy-body, again) conversers asking it of a mystical supercomputer keeping it's vast mass in hyperspace. None of the computers can answer, and prefer to wait for more data. Eventually the computers and humans merge (that theme again) into a single being (I guess that is the Singularity?) and slip into hyperspace just before the universe heat-dies (correct usage?) and the HumPuter (my term, I forget what Asimov calls it) ponders the Question, eventually deciding it has figured it out. Thus entropy is reversed and the universe was created, with the implication that this is what God is (the religion conversation sneaking back into this thread). -Arlo James Barnes
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