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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It might sound pretty cool to be frozen for a century or two and then thought out to see what

the future holds, but of course if everyone did that, their future wouldn't hold anything.

Today we'll be examining the science and technology of freezing people and asking what

the ramifications of it would actually be if it became a regular and easy process.

Of course at the moment it's neither regular nor easy.

Even freezing people isn't very easy and that's supposed to be the easy part.

Freezing people for later thawing and revival is a bit of a misnomer.

What we're talking about in modern terms is taking the corpses of the already deceased and

trying to freeze them for too much damage sets in and a way that doesn't cause too

much more damage during freezing itself.

Indeed the main process focused on in these cases is vitrification, essentially turning

the subject into a non-crystalline solid like glass, but we'll treat that as freezing

today too, as

we're not too interested in the specific procedures, just their impact on society if done successfully

for a given value of the word success.

...