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,

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Space is often called the Final Front, a place of billions and billions of worlds awaiting

explorers and pioneers.

But what will those journeys be like, and what gear will people need for them?

And perhaps most importantly of all, what sort of people will make those travels.

There are a lot of famous science fiction writers, but only a few are of truly legendary status,

and one of those is Robert Heinlein, often called the dean of science fiction writers,

and a lot of that comes down to the sheer amount

of accurate detail he often vested in his work. One of the examples of that is his novel

Half-Space Suit Will Travel in 1958, written the year before Starship Troopers, as the last novel

in his Young Adult series was Scribner, and critically, before

anyone has been to space and more than a decade before we walked on the moon.

I won't spoil the novel, it's a classic, but it tells the story of a young man trying

to win a trip to the moon as a prize, and instead getting a distant runner-up gift of a used spacesuit in need

of much repair. Our young protagonist goes into detail on how he fixes it up, and Heinleyn gets

...