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 add free, plus hours of bonus content, check out go.nebola.t.v.

T.slai. 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 are doing it and what strategies we will pursue as we claim these new worlds.

The 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 into stellar 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 state 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.

...