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 add free, plus hours of bonus content,

check out go.nebola.t.v.t.v. And use my code, Isaac Arthur.

In the future, we may deploy armies of cybernetic superhumans to fight our battles,

people so augmented they could tear through walls or dodge bullets.

But would these invincible warriors be willing to fight for mundane humans,

or merely fight each other to rule us?

No! humans, or merely fight each other to rule us.

Hamza was born on the planet of New Damascus. He doesn't remember the city of his birth because it was vaporized in an atomic blast when he was two.

He grew up in a refugee camp with half a dozen different cultures

mish-mashed together, but his grandmother told him his name meant powerful. He certainly

never felt powerful, not with half a dozen defects and illnesses that left him both a cripple

as a boy and a social reject, one picked on by everyone else and valued by no one.

The doctor who visits their camp every week told him he would have been easily cured if he

lived back in civilized space, but to Hamza, that's little consolation.

When Hamza turned 18-year standard, he joined the Martian Foreign Legion.

They didn't have to talk him into cybernetic augmentation, indeed he spent most of his salary

on extra components, upgrades and bootlegs.

That club foot he had is gone, so those worthless lungs he had that always coughed up blood

and flam from the harsh radioactive dust storms of New Damascus, where the regolith is like

ground up glass. Homsar can see a hummingbird's wings flap at the From the harsh radioactive dust storms of New Damascus, where the regolith is like ground-up

...