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.

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check out go.nebola.tv slash Isaac Arthur and use my code, Isaac Arthur.

We often see stories of invincible warriors with superhuman abilities, combating monstrous

threat, but all the days of super-soldiers nearly upon us, and could they be the biggest

threat of all.

Welcome back to Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur for another sci-fi Sunday here on

SFIA, where we look at common concepts in science fiction and ask how scientifically realistic

they are, or how they might arrive in the real world.

Today our topic will be Super Soldiers, and like a lot of examples in sci-fi, this is one also common both in

history and mythology. Our civilizations have risen and fallen on the shields of our soldiers,

or sometimes under their boots, and whoever had the best tended to win. The reality is that

numbers are rarely very decisive, More troops is better than fewer

troops, all things being equal, but all things are never equal. A handful of well-trained and

well-equipped veterans is worth ten times their number of newly trained troops, and not because

they could each beat ten at once, but rather because over the course of a dozen successive

engagements of more even size, they will have undoubtedly decisively won each of those, and

as a result, eroded those larger numbers down. This gives us the first rule of warfare that

every strategist needs to know. It is quality rather than quantity, that matters. There are some

exceptions where equipment or doctrine is just so superior that a single warrior might face

...