On May 21, 2061, two Multivac technicians, Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov, placed a five‑dollar bet while sharing highballs. Their wager sparked the first utterance of Asimov’s “last question” as humanity finally tapped the Sun’s full output. Multivac had already powered lunar, Martian and Venusian missions, but the new SolarStation promised limitless energy. It used a mile‑wide collector orbiting halfway to the Moon, beaming power globally today.

After the switch, Earth abandoned coal and uranium, linking every device to the SolarStation. In the quiet of an abandoned Multivac chamber, Adell mused that the system could melt the planet into iron and still have surplus energy. Lupov countered, insisting even a twenty‑billion‑year supply would end when the Sun died, raising the classic entropy cosmic dilemma.

The pair typed the ultimate query—whether humanity could reverse universal entropy and rejuvenate a dead star—into Multivac’s console. The machine sputtered, then printed “INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER,” leaving the bet unsettled. Meanwhile, the crew of the starship X‑23 celebrated arrival at a distant system, underscoring that even with infinite power, some questions remain still beyond computational reach.