The Galactic Empire was collapsing. His fall was inexorable, but as slow as the Empire was extensive. It would have gone unnoticed had it not been for a man, Hari Seldon, who knew how to anticipate the future: through the science of psychohistory, he calculated that thirty thousand years of barbarism would happen to the Empire. To shorten the interregnum, Seldon established two Foundations on opposite ends of the Galaxy: The First Foundation, a world of physical scientists whose path through the vicissitudes of history would be marked by the "Seldon crises," a series of twists predicted by the psychohistory; and the Second Foundation, a world of mental scientists that would watch over the course of the First and make the corrections that the passing of the centuries made necessary. Together, both Foundations would constitute the seed of a new Galactic Empire that, thanks to Seldon's plan, would arise just a thousand years after the fall of the previous one.