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.

When we look up into the night's skies, all we see is absence and silence, but could our galaxy

be a dark forest full of hidden predators waiting to consume us?

So welcome back to the sci-fi Sunday here on SFIA, where we take concepts in

science fiction and examine them in light of known and theoretical science.

Today we'll be examining the notion of a mostly silent and hostile galaxy, as we see

in mini-science fiction works, from HP Lovecraft's Cosmic Horror Works, featuring old

monsters like Cthulhu

Praying on the Galaxy, to modern takes on the work like Alastairns-Rennard's Revelation

Space series, and Sixth and Loo's trilogy The Remembrance of Earth's Past, whose second novel,

The Dark Forest, popularized one of the forming paradox solutions we'll be discussing today,

though it's worth noting the specific Ferming solution in question was discussed at least as early

as 1983 by another excellent sci-fi author, David Brin.

Now we will be discussing a few variants of quiet and hostile galaxies today, including

the Berserker Hypothesis, named for another great sci-fi series

by Fred Saberhagen, and this is hardly our first look at the Fermi Paradox. Indeed, we did a short

episode on the Dark Forest and its use of game theory four years back, when I first started doing

the occasional bonus episode, beyond our normal Thursday episodes, which quickly

evolved into our mid-month sci-fi Sunday, and back then, bonus episodes were about half

...