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 all

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

many science fiction works from

H.P. Lovecraft's Cosmic Horror Works, featuring old monsters like Cthulhu preying on

the galaxy, to modern takes on the work like Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series

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

Dark Forest, popularized

one of the forming paradox solutions we'll be discussing today, though it's worth

knowing the specific forming paradox solution in question, was discussed at least as early as

1983 by another excellent sci-fi author, David Bryn.

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

...