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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This episode is brought to you by Brilliant.

In the future, humanity will travel to space and settle many new worlds and new frontiers,

but where will the first settlement be?

Welcome back to another episode of Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur. Today on SFIA we will be looking at the concept of our first space settlement, and to

do that we need to start by discussing what a space settlement is and also what it is not. For instance, the International

Space Station is not a space settlement, neither were the Apollo missions. Also, while New York

City was founded as a settlement in 1624, or New Amsterdam as it was called then, we wouldn't

think of modern New York as a settlement. Between those obvious

extremes, we have to be a bit arbitrary in setting up a guideline for what qualifies and where,

and even when. Now what we really mean when we say space settlement does not merely apply

to settlements that are freely floating in space, but also to settlements

on or orbiting other planets and moons, as a settlement on Mars or the moon count, but those

are not in space, except where we are using space to mean not Earth, and we'll be contemplating

today whether or not that first space settlement will be on a rocky body or fully floating

in orbit of Earth or at one of our sun's Lagrange points.

Indeed it could easily be none of the above too.

It might be on Venus or a Near Earth asteroid for instance, or it might be an interplanetary

cycler, a large spaceship and space station hybrid that runs on a long elliptical orbit

...