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we're asking the reason alien civilizations might be rare is because most aliens are huge.

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Every dreamer knows that it's entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to,

perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground, Judith Thurman.

Thank you. Judith Thurman. So last month we began a look at surveying habitable interstellar star systems, where we first focused on the astronomy side of things, looking for biosignitials or signs of good

planets from light years away with telescopes.

A couple weeks back we looked at the role of interstellar probes, principally flyby probes that

could get to systems far quicker than a probe designed to orbit a world.

Today's episode, looking at what it would be like to be a planetary explorer, is a direct sequel to that episode.

So if you haven't seen it yet, you may want to pause and go watch that episode first.

As a quick recap though, in that episode we created a hypothetical example for illustrating the process of how we might respond

to a possible techno-signentric signal that we received from the

Epsilon for NASA system in the year 2100 AD.

Epsilon for NASA's is a 12 billion year-old binary system 100 light years from Earth in the

Furnax constellation of the Southern Hemisphere named by astronomer Nicholas Louis de la Chil in 1756.

We introduced six programs to pursue answers.

The first was a signal sent to the system, complete with our lexicon.

The second was the commission of a powerful telescope to indefinitely watch the system,

named Nicholas.

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