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.nebula.tv slash Isaac Arthur and use my code, Isaac Arthur.

When it comes to conflict inside families and nations, we say a house divided against itself cannot stand.

But what about a planet?

So the last few episodes we were talking about what we should do if we encounter aliens,

or if it turns out we have the whole galaxy to ourselves, and

a comment someone made was that if that turned out to be the case, no aliens, then at least

we would have to worry about war out in the stars.

Unfortunately, humanity has a long history of war and none of it with aliens, just ourselves,

and often our fights aren't between nation and nation, but internal conflicts,

and it seems to be on a lot of people's minds these days, too,

so I thought today we would explore what civil wars in the future might look like

at both the planetary and interplanetary scale.

We will also touch on the notion of conflicts inside space habitats or even Dyson swarms,

battles out in the void between stars, and even breakaway interstellar colonies.

We want to discuss how those conflicts might evolve and how they would be fought, but first, we need to ask who is fighting them, and what the landscape and battlefield would be.

Civil War and Rebellion is certainly a regular conversation in science fiction, it's the

background plot of the entire Star Wars setting, both in terms of the Galactic Empire and Republic,

and the Jedi vs. Sith and Dark Jedi, Star Wars is the larger sci-fi

franchise to discuss it, but hardly the only one, and it's common in the fantasy

...