Hello, SFIA audio listeners.

In this month's Nebula exclusive, big alien theory,

we're asking the reason alien civilizations might be rare

is because most aliens are huge.

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plus hours of bonus content,

check out go.nebola.tv slash Isaac Arthur,

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In a future so distant that all has decayed to nothingness and time itself ceases to

exist, might this eternal moment of oblivion bring on a fiery resurrection to all of space and time?

So today we're going to be looking at conformal cyclic cosmology,

which suggests we may be living a cyclic universe that fades out to nothing and then resets,

along with some other cyclic scenarios from other cosmological models that might leave remnants

behind that we could detect. A year back we did an episode looking at the concept of Omega Point Cosmology, the notion

that life might be heading to some massive, unified, and eternal mind that was very popular

under the Big Crunch Cosmology, which has grown out of favor with our expanding knowledge

of Dark Energy and the accelerating expansion of our universe.

As we discussed in that episode, simply because dark energy is still so mysterious, there

are still pathways by which a big crunch might happen, and our episode's Black Hole Farming

and Iron Stars, which were two of the show's early hits about eight years back, explore

the alternative eternal expansion

option for life going on after the star was born out, known as Dyson's Eternal Intelligence.

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