One Thousand Years

Music=
1. Sooner Or Later- Michelle Branch

"When it is obvious that a goal cannot be reached, don't change the
goal, change the action steps" - Confucious

UFOtext=
Beta longed to understand psychohistory- but a complete exposition of
that predictive science existed nowhere in the Foundation. At best a
vague sketchy outline of the subject existed in the public domain. As
Dr. Savage explained, Foundation researchers applied reverse
engineering techniques to figure out some basic characteristics of
psychohistory, but no one had the silver bullet-a pristine first
principles derivation of a psychohistory theory that made accurate &
nontrivial predictions. That remained Seldon's legendary (or
mythical?) breakthrough. But Beta had three reasons to believe she
might be able to rediscover psychohistory-
1. Unlike Seldon, she already knew it existed!
2. Many features, albeit incomplete, were known.
And most importantly, reason #3-
Foundation computers were light years more advanced than any other
computers in history. One could ask computers to discover new
mathematical theorems and even new branches of mathematical thought-
and they would if asked in the right way. Many new & useful
mathematical theorems discovered by Foundation computers had proofs so
difficult that no human being had yet understood the proofs. Thus, if
Beta could ask a computer "in the right way" to rediscover
psycohistory, maybe it could. However, there did exist one flaw-
sooner or later the computer would get the answer, but what if it took
one thousand years? And then she gently touched her bright silver
pendant.

Sent from my iPhone