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.

As we peer out into the night sky and wonder if they are all intelligent minds besides

humans on other planets, is it possible that we will elevate other minds here on this planet

and lift them up with us to the heavens above?

In science fiction, we often see encounters between advanced civilizations and those which

are more primitive.

Sometimes those primitives are modern humans in the technological sense, and sometimes

they only modern in the biological sense, where we see a visit to a Stone Age civilization.

There's a lot of reasons to wonder if such an

encounter might end badly for one or more of those parties, even if the more advanced

civilization is not hostile to them, but they will be considering the case where that

civilization seeks to uplift the more primitive one. The term uplifting comes to us from

scientists and sci-fi writer David Brin

in his 1980 novel, Sundiver, the first book of his uplift saga that deals with the ethics

and morality of uplifting other species. In that series, every other civilization in the galaxy

has some other civilization that was its patron and uplifted it,

and humanity is the odd case out, in that we arose without any known benefactor and had uplifted

a couple of other species native to Earth before encountering any aliens.

It's an excellent look at the topic of what that relationship might be like between patron

...