Fermi's lunchtime question, and the inward turn as the candidate answer requiring the fewest miracles
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Enrico Fermi's 1950 lunchtime question — where is everybody? — is the anomaly the unification essay closes on: a galaxy old enough and crossable enough that its silence embarrasses every estimate. The essay's candidate answer is the inward turn: a civilization that completes its energy build-out finds the interesting frontier is no longer where but what, and lives in worlds of its own design rather than crossing light-years to stand on dead rock. The essay grades its own claim honestly — a serious candidate in the astrobiology literature, not a verdict, filed in the ledger as sound extrapolation with the counterargument at full strength. Read it in the essay, chapters five and six; the family origin of the idea is a cabin with a transparent roof.
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Freeman Dyson's 1960 observation, and the essay's most encouraging arithmetic: no new physics, only decades of engineering
Open →the bedtime version taught bySelma, 1965 — and the promise
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