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.

One of the non-intuitive aspects of space is that things in it don't really have locations,

they are constantly shifting where they are relative to Earth, and usually at very high speed.

The garage points are the rare racices, stationary islands in space.

As a result, they are in valuable real estate.

Space is huge, but only a couple places are static in relation to Earth. One is any object in geostationary orbit, a ring of space 22,000 miles above the equator,

where the orbital period is exactly once every 24 hours.

Objects they orbit the same rate to our planet spins,

thus appearing as if they hang right overhead. This is a tiny little ring around our planet

compared to Earth's total orbital space. It's currently pretty full and getting fuller of geostationary

satellites, so that space is very valuable. But there's another region

of interest to us today, indeed 10 of them, called our Lagrange points, and these points

are unique for being stable places that don't move relative to the bodies they are connected

to. Today we'll be discussing them, how they function, and what value they have.

They've already proven themselves useful, the James Webb Telescope is at the Earth's

Sun, L2 Lagrange Point, or in orbit of it to be more precise, because that keeps the Earth

between the telescope and the overwhelming glare and noise of the Sun.

The Lagrange points of any two-body system orbiting each other, like Earth with the Sun or Earth

with the Moon, are spots where the gravity of the two bodies causes a pocket that will

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