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

Our daily life seems to increasingly revolve around

smartphones, and soon smart houses and small cars, but what about the towns and cities we live in?

Some months back, I was at an event where a lot of discussion was taking place about urban planning

and the various technologies we might incorporate into it, everything from vehicle charging stations to phone charging stations,

Wi-Fi coverage, and many points in between. Ironically, for someone who dislikes living

in cities personally, preferring my farm here in Plymouth, I always find city management and

planning fascinating or at least I have since

playing SimCity on the Super Nintendo a few decades back. So the conversations on urban planning at that

event caught my interest, and I heard the term smart city getting used there, which I'd heard

in passing elsewhere in recent years, but had never really heard it to find. I asked some folks

for some more info

on the general concept, and I got a lot of fascinating but often vague details and explanations,

some not matching others. Neither to say, our goal in today's episode is not really to try

to better define a term that's still rather embryonic, but rather to discuss the concepts

under its umbrella and what we'll

see coming in both the near and far future.

The term Smart City has been growing in popularity in recent years, doubtless due to the influence

of the world's smartphone, and while many of the concepts involved are older than the

...