Hello, SFIA audio listeners.

In this month's Nebula exclusive, big alien theory, we're asked at 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.

So a few months back, I finally got talked to trying out some short-form content, and

after we did a bunch, folks started asking if we could make a compilation of them to

watch on YouTube or over on Nebula and our audio-only podcasting platforms.

I figured we would release them in groups of 20, so unlike the solo shorts, you might

want a drink and a snack.

I'll talk more about it at the end, but by popular demand, and without further ado, here's

the first 20 shorts we produced in summer of 2023.

Krasar Canon.

A quasar is a quasi-stellar object many times brighter than an entire galaxy, often radiating

more power than a quadrillion normal stars, and releasing a billion billion billion times more

power every second than a megaton thermonuclear bomb.

Crasars are less common nowadays, as we believe they were caused by large quantities of

matter falling into supermassive black holes in a core of a younger and more turbulent

galaxy.

It should be possible to set off such an event artificially, or even use a smaller black

hole to generate the effect, such as we believe causes gamma ray bursts, much as we can convert an entire star into a giant

death ray, as with the Nykel Dyson beam, it should be possible to create a quasar cannon

around a black hole that had a more focused and targetable gamma ray beam, potentially millions

to trillions of times more destructive than even a Nikodyson beam. For more examples of such megastructures, like the Krasar Drive, see our episode The Megastructural

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