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.

To hear it and every episode early and ad-free, plus hours of bonus content,

check out go.nebula.tv slash Isaac Arthur and use my code, Isaac Arthur.

So, you've committed to terraforming a new world, to creating gardens where once was only a dead

planet, but even with a plan in place, the challenges ahead remain just as daunting.

It is a task of not just a lifetime, but entire generations to come.

A lot of times when we talk about traveling to new worlds and transplanting humanity there,

we imagine seeing some domes covering some blasted and desolate terrain in the early days,

and then later seen forests and gardens all over the planet.

Getting from point A to point B is a big topic, and today is an informal sequel to last

month's episode on early terraforming, though you don't need to have watched that first,

as we'll repeat some of the necessary basics, though I want to poke deeper into the details

today. Often, when we

discuss space habitats, we talk about how much easier they are to create ecosystems in,

then terraforming a whole planet, but the details tend to be scarce. There's an old South

Park joke that comes to mind, in regard to socks and undergarments

tending to disappear in the laundry, where the characters discover where their clothes have

gone missing, and why, kinda.

It turns out gnomes have been stealing them to resell them, and their business model consists

of a simple three steps. Step one, steal the clothes.

Step two, and step three, profit. Step two is mysteriously left blank, and the gnome seemed to

...