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.

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This episode is sponsored by Skillshare.

You might have lived in some places you thought were real holes, but for future

residents of the moon, that would actually be a good thing.

Yeah. So today we are returning to the moon, something humans haven't physically done in almost 50 years since the Apollo program. That will be fairly important to our discussion today

about setting up large-scale and

permanent facilities in craters on the moon, because when we think about going back to

the moon, a major question that always comes up is why, and what will be achieved by walking

around collecting rock samples for a few days, and the answer to that really is, not much.

Those Apollo rock samples were of great scientific worth, and more would be handy but not

enough to justify a mission there at outrageous expense and more than a bit of danger, and

why wouldn't we just send robotic sampling missions?

That's a lot of why the US hasn't gone back and nobody's worked too hard to be the

second to get there. It's also why when we talk about returning, we tend to talk seriously. That's a lot of why the US hasn't gone back and nobody's worked too hard to be the second

to get there.

It's also why when we talk about returning, we tend to talk seriously about long-term

or permanent facilities.

Not only would a permanent base let us get some serious signs done, but allows us to

begin exploiting the Moon as a gateway to space development and off-world industry as we looked at last

...