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.

This episode is sponsored by Brilliant.

The nature of what it is to be human is something we've long struggled with, and it's a

question that will only get more complex with time, but as we'll see today, in regard to digital

minds, for such people, time itself might be a rather hazy concept.

When I was a kid, everyone talked about how the computer age or information age had begun,

but sometimes we instead called it the digital age, and that might turn out to be much

truer than we originally thought.

Today we'll be looking at what it might be like to be a digital being, one whose mind

was stored on a computer, either one inside a cybernetic or android body, or existing entirely

inside virtual worlds.

I will start though by saying that we're not too interested in digital versus analog,

a digital mind has become a bit of

a blanket term for a mind not stored on mushy gray matter, but digital and analog are

ways of storing, moving, and using data. You could create a biological digital computer

or an analog computer and use either to emulate the other approach.

That certainly has its own unique challenges and discussions, but we'll be focusing on the

concept from that blanket terms perspective today.

We also don't want to focus too much on organic brain versus electronic computer, this is mixing

...