Hello, SFIA audio listeners. In this month's Nebula exclusive, big alien theory,

we're asked at 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.

Many great thinkers have speculated that we might live in some sort of simulation or dream,

and while we often debate if this is true, or if we are real or not, or if it even matters,

maybe a better question is how do we break out of the simulation or learn to control it.

So there's a classic scene in the movie The Matrix, where Morpheus is offering

Neo a red pill and a blue pill, and the red pill is supposed to offer a painful truth about

reality. This turns out to be very true in Neo's case as he wakes up in a vat, surrounded

by untold numbers of other scrawny, atrophied humans

filled with plugs, and finds out that he's been a brain and a jar his whole life, living

in a simulation.

It raises the question, though, why the red pill he took caused him to be awoken in that vat,

and ejected while still alive, effectively flushed down the drain, where he can be rescued by

freedom fighters, valiantly seeking to save everyone for modern life in favor of living

like hunted rats in those bleak sewers.

The movies afterward in some associated works offer some rationales and clarifications for

that, but they've got lots of holes in them, and given that the entire premise

is that humans make good power plants, also as biological processors in the early scripts,

realism is not really on the table in that franchise for us to dissect.

Though one could make the argument that sci-fi's obsession with some tangible life force

...