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.

This episode is brought to you by World Anvil.

As we head out to the moon and beyond, to settle our solar system, we will need to decide

why we were doing it and what strategies we will pursue as we claim these new worlds.

A few weeks back, we did an episode on Convergent Evolution, where we

discussed evolutionary survival strategies, overarching concepts like mass egg laying or seed

production versus single births and parents. And I thought today we'd apply this to one of

our favorite topics on the show, colonizing our solar system. Indeed, the parallels are pretty

strong. One approach in nature to spreading an organism is to create seed pods the wind will

carry far away to many places, and one of our approaches to interstellar space colonization

are seed ships and von Neumann probes, tiny spacecraft that grow more of themselves, or even build

a civilization when they arrive, then send more seeds off. Today's topic is colonizing our

solar system though, not interstellar space, and in many ways we are more curious about the motivations

driving the actors because of so many possible strategies. Whether you're

rushing to stake claims on gold-rich asteroids or aiming to mass-upload humanity to giant solar-powered

computers to run their brains and virtual utopias, really alters your strategy for colonization.

We often discuss the particular processes for terraforming a world or various megastructures we

might build in space to serve as habitats, industries, or weapon systems, but we don't really

talk about the basic drive, motivation, and strategy of doing these things.

...