“Any fool can tell a crisis when it arrives. The real service to the state is to detect it in embryo.”
~ Foundation by Isaac Asimov ¹

This is the second time I’m reading this book, that too after a gap of around 20 years. I had forgotten so much of the book that it felt like I was reading a new book. Wanted to read the book (or may be even the series) before the TV series started on Apple TV+. The trailer looked super promising and gave a glimpse of the vastness of the Galactic Empire that Asimov had envisioned.

Collection of Short Stories

The book is a collection of 5 short stories - The Psychohistorians, The Encyclopedists, The Mayors, The Traders, and The Merchant Princes. At the end of the book, one gets the feeling that you’re just beginning on an epic journey. What we see are small glimpses of what happened. Like an old man telling a story from his youth, or like reading random stories from an epic anthology. Every story starts with a passage from “Encyclopedia Galactica”, a hypothetical compendium of knowledge. The first story sets the backdrop of the beginning of the Foundation (or foundations). The second takes place 50 years after the first, the third is 30 years after that, the fourth (The Traders) is 55 years after that and so on.

The vast world

What is surprising is that the book was published in 1951, 70 years prior to now! In fact, the individual stories in the book were published in the preceding decade. The immense world-building and the numbers are so mind-boggling that it is not easy for one to wrap one’s mind around it. The Galactic Empire has reigned for 12,000 years. Humans have populated millions of planets. The total population of humanity is in quintillions. Trantor the planet which is the capital of the Galactic Empire, has a population of 40 billion. In 1951 40B might have been such a huge number for a planet since the population of Earth back then, was around 2.5B. Now earth has over 8B people and 40B is only 5 times as big. If we have mile-long cities below the surface, it would not be that crowded as we think it would be. Though Factfulness does mention that the population most probably will plateau once it reaches around 11-12B. We’ll have to see what the future holds. My hope is that the population keeps increasing and that humans will be able to inhabit other planets. It is more optimistic to visualize a 12,000 year Galactic Era in the future than a desolate earth destroyed by human fighting. Also, ten thousand years into the future, one could hope that human lifespan could be much more than the mere hundred years of the present.

The Beginning

Hari Seldon, a psychohistorian, is in Trantor at the beginning of the novel (the first short story). Hari is predicting that the empire will fall in the next 300 years to enter into a dark age for 30,000 years. Hari has a plan to reduce the time to just 1000 years. He is captured for espousing traitorous ideas of the fall of the Empire and brought to trial. During his trial, he maintains that the fall of the Empire is inevitable and says that it is necessary for a group of people to be assembled to consolidate all the knowledge into an encyclopedia, creating what he calls as ‘The Foundation’. As a punishment, the committee exiles him to a planet named Terminus in the corner of the galaxy. It is later revealed that Terminus is the exact planet that Hari wanted to create the Foundation in. We also get to know that there is another foundation being created at the other end of the galaxy.

Hari is able to predict what happens in the future based on his calculations. Long after Hari is dead and gone, a recorded voice of his plays exactly 50 years after Foundation is established. The book mentions a few times that the laws of statistics applied to large groups of people could predict the general outcome of future events. One of the characters asks whether it could predict a single person’s life to which the answer is that No, one cannot foresee a single person’s future using psychohistory. The inspiration probably came from Bernoulli’s Theorem (the law of large numbers) which says that outcome of an experiment will converge to the expected value when it is performed a large number of times (or using a large sample). So if a coin is flipped multiple times, the result will converge to 1/2 as the number of tries approaches infinity.

Reflections

In the third chapter, it was interesting to see The Foundation exercising control over the four planets (four kingdoms) nearby through religion (named Scientism). The Foundation itself is set up on Terminus, a planet with scarce resources but it has scholars and superior technology. The Foundation shares its technology with the four Kingdoms by referring to it as “holy” artifacts and rules. Scientism has priests who are trained on Terminus but they are unaware of the true nature of the technology that they are using. I was reminded of an article that I’d read in the past where someone had listed many of the superstitions followed in India and the scientific basis behind them. Peepal trees being associated with ghosts and sleeping under them is not good, one must take bath after attending a funeral, don’t cut nails after sunset, etc.

In the last story, Hober Mallow, a master trader, realizes the limitation of religion to conquer more territories (planets/kingdoms). The way to expand more is through trade. So when the Republic of Korell declares war on The Foundation, Mallow takes no action but imposes a ‘sanction’ on Korell stopping trade. This forces Korell to surrender without The Foundation having to go on a war. That is so similar to the way some countries today maintain control over other aggressive nations!

Winning things through diplomacy and scientific knowledge is a huge theme throughout the book. In fact, the statement “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” is repeated often, especially in the last story.

Quotes

“It is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works.”

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

“Past glories are poor feeding.”

It’s a worship of the past. It’s a deterioration—a stagnation!

“Encyclopedias don’t win wars.”

“The rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had.”

“Religion is the most potent device known with which to control men and worlds.”

“Ambitious men will not wait and unscrupulous men will not hang back. By their every action they will hasten the decay of the worlds.”

“Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty.”