Fermi Paradox (demo)
Mercury's space demo that won the PC demo competition at Revision 2016 and showed that a demo can say something, not just show something.
It is named after the question physicist Enrico Fermi reportedly asked over lunch in 1950: if the universe is so big and so old, where is everybody? The demo doesn't answer it, but stages it in long, unhurried sequences of space, megastructures and abandoned civilisations, rendered in real time on an ordinary graphics card.
Fermi Paradox took first place in the PC demo compo at Revision 2016 and is routinely listed among the most important PC demos of the 2010s. It also shows how the scene has shifted: early demos bragged about effects nobody thought possible, while the modern PC demo leans on direction, pacing and music — the hardware can already do everything.