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Page 212
Alpha and at last finds Earth, fatally radioactive and lifeless. Finally, however, Trevise decides that the secret must lie on Earth's moon and there, in an artificial cavern, discovers Daneel. Daneel describes what he has been doing over the past 20,000 years to pursue the Zeroth Law and protect humanity, including the founding of Gaia and the start of Galaxia. He also reveals that he is dying. He has been totally replaced a number of times over the years, but the increasing complexity and storage capacity of his brain has reached the limits of uncertainty. He will die before Galaxia can be achieved.
Trevise confirms his choice of Galaxia on the basis of his discovery of a third and unstated axiom on which Seldon's Plan was based: there are other galaxies that may contain other, alien intelligences, and the human Galaxy must be united as one in order not to be fighting among its various parts when aliens from other galaxies invade. And Daneel will gain three or four more centuries of existence to bring Galaxia into being by merging his mind with that of the hermaphroditic Solarian child, Fallom.
Foundation and Earth was Asimov's Odyssey, with Trevise and his crew experiencing the mysteries of the Galaxy and escaping its perils as they try to return (to the ancestral human) home, and Daneel as Penelope. Daneel has no suitors, of course (unless the leaders of the First and Second Foundation, already rejected, can be considered for that role), and the fanciful parallel breaks down in other ways. The novel, divided into seven parts for each of the seven worlds they visit, is as episodic as the Odyssey, however, and attempts the same epic cultural justification, in this case the humanization of the Galaxy. In it we can see laid out all the science-fiction virtues: intelligence, cooperation, problem-solving, and concern for future generations and humanity itself, as it fulfills Jack Williamson's definition of space opera: "the expression of a mythic theme of human expansion against an unknown and commonly hostile frontier."
The novel is not a major addition to the Asimov canon, but it fulfills its major purpose of answering most of the questions that Asimov readers have accumulated about the Foundation universe, and it ends with an appropriately grand climax, the expansion of the human struggle beyond the Galaxy into the universe. Perhaps this was "the loose and untied matter" that Asimov had left in case he wanted to return, to write his Iliad, or it may have been the existence of Fallom, whose unfathomable eyes were resting on Trevise as he said, "It is not as if we had the enemy already here and among us." But five years later,

 
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