Hello, SFIA audio listeners.

In this month's Nebula exclusive, big alien theory,

we're asked at 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.

This episode is brought to you by Brilliant.

Many think fission has gotten a bad rap, but modern reactor designs and the demand for clean power

may you redeem what was once thought to be an energy panacea.

So today we'll be talking about the future of nuclear fission and looking everything

from new reactor designs to applications in space and in other areas like medicine and agriculture

and even portable devices.

As a quick side note, today marks the sixth anniversary of our very first episode, Megastructures

in Space, and we'll commemorate that

briefly at the end of the episode, and it's appropriate for our topic today as power and

energy production are so vital to our grand dreams for the future, and as we'll see today,

fission is likely to play an enormous role in taking us into that future, especially

for the spacecraft that will actually take us there.

The elephant in the room for nuclear power is always the concerns about safety and I tend to

think a fair amount of that is simply from nuclear power and radiation being a bit mysterious.

I don't want to dwell too much on the safety concerns or particle physics today, but we

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