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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We view our sun as eternal and stable, the object around which the day revolves, and which

has been and always will be, and yet it is a whirling mass of chaos and storms of fire.

In September of 1859, a year and a half before the American Civil War began, 162 years before this recording,

Earth experienced the Kerington event, the most powerful geomagnetic storm ever recorded.

Telegraph systems all over North America and Europe went haywire, telegraph line towers

buzzed in arced, setting sparks to the ground.

In some places the arcing started fires in dry grass, several telegraph operators received

severe shocks, and a few offices, metal contacts melted,

and papers near the wires caught fire.

With telegraphers busy putting out fires and many lines shorting out, America's only

fast, long-distance communication network was mostly shut down, and that meant the trains

had to be postponed too for safety.

Most interestingly interestingly though,

or perhaps most eerily to the bewildered operators, officers connected by the lines that hadn't

been shorted out, found they could still send each other messages even after they disconnected

...