Not a chance its chance #3

How likely do you think it is that I would listen to a story: The Black Monk, by Moliere in which an idea is mentioned in the story line that ‘33,000 years of very great suffering can be compressed into 1000 years’ and then hear the same idea in an audio tape, in a different context within a few days? I borrowed The Black Monk on tape from the library and listened to it. On my way to return it I realized I had nothing to listen to so I picked up a tape that had been laying on the corner of the kitchen countertop. It had been there for some time for no apparent reason. I do things like that, it just was there. I took the tape and began to listen to it on my way to work. The story was Isaac Asimov’s Prelude to the Foundation. The book by Asimov had the same words in it ‘that 33,000 years of very great suffering could be compressed into 1,000 years under certain circumstances’. ( Isaac Asimov and I have the same birthday, January 2, but different birth years . I have read most of his science fictions, which do not seem fictional now. ) Wikipedia has a fine synopsis of the book and the origin of the idea. The Foundation Series is a science fiction series by Isaac Asimov. The premise of the series is that mathematician Hari Seldon spent his life developing a branch of mathematics known as psychohistory, a concept of mathematical sociology (analogous to mathematical physics). Using the laws of mass action, it can predict the future, but only on a large scale; it is error-prone on a small scale. It works on the principle that the behaviour of a mass of people is predictable if the quantity of this mass is very large (equal to the population of the galaxy, which has a population of quadrillions of humans, inhabiting millions of star systems). The larger the number, the more predictable is the future. Using these techniques, Seldon foresees the imminent fall of the Galactic Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way, and a dark age lasting thirty thousand years before a second great empire arises. Seldon's psychohistory also foresees an alternative where the intermittent period will last only one thousand years. To ensure his vision of a second great Empire comes to fruition, Seldon creates two Foundations—small, secluded havens of all human knowledge—at "opposite ends of the galaxy". The focus of the series is on the First Foundation and its attempts to overcome various obstacles during the formation and installation of the Second Empire, all the while being silently guided by the unknown specifics of The Seldon Plan.