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.nebola.tv slash Isaac Arthur and use my code, Isaac Arthur.

Time is vast, and yet in our brief candle flicker of existence, we forge civilizations

a seat to outlast that starves themselves, and map the ages to come.

We live in a moment, a flash of thought and breath, amid a universe whose lifetime defies

comprehension.

The cosmos did not begin with stars or galaxies, with a blinding surge of energy and symmetry,

broken in an instant, setting to motion a chain of epochs that span from the tiniest fraction of a second

to ages far longer than the current age of the universe itself.

Some of these epochs are so brief they slip through our fingers like grains of sand.

Others stretch into eons that could swallow the entirety of recorded history a billion times over

and still be young. The stars so eternal to

us are but a chapter, perhaps not even that, in the larger chronicle of time. And through it all,

the great question lingers, can civilizations endure through these epochs? We will simply

fade like starlight or find new

ways to shine long after the stars are gone? Can life, thought, and purpose outlast the

death of stars and the dissolution of matter? Could it even have existed before they did?

Today we will begin a journey not just across space, but through the very eras of time

itself, mapping out the cosmic calendar, from the first quantum flickrows of existence

...