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.

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Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Science and Futures on Isaac Arthur,

live streaming this day on July 30th, 2023,

and as always, joined by my lovely co-host and wife, Sarah Falalithor.

So we'll go ahead and take right to your questions,

and as always, please put them in as clear and concise format as you can to get them

in the chat so they can be laid on to be the a need to start off with we do we have a question

from albert jackinson who's a big fan of the show and a regular he said recently i read a chapter

of starry messenger by neal degross t Tyson and in the chapter about exploration and discovery

Neil appeared to demonstrate with examples from 1870 until now in 30 year intervals.

Change in technology was always exponential due to how ideas are spread.

This is different than the singularity, at least in the way I understand it.

What do you think of this idea, since, if I remember rightly, you have said in the past

that singularity as an idea is too simplistic.

I think that's, well, I think it's probably not what we was going for there to say that's a definite thing either.

I don't want to put words in his mouth, but the idea there is we can cherry pick things very easily when it comes to technological progress.

I'll give you an example, something else that's grown in roughly 30 years intervals of the human population.

In fact, in the last century, it doubled every 50 years.

That's exponential growth.

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