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.

This episode is brought to you by Morning

Brew. If the past is anything to judge by, one thing humanity is sure to bring with us in our

journey to the stars are arguments, interests, and squabbles. So what else does the past tell us

about the future? Today we have a two-part episode looking at the geopolitics of colonizing space, and

we are joined by Rudyard Lynch of the What If Art Hiss channel to give us some historical

insight into how this might all play out.

The second half of the episode will be over on his channel, and don't forget to hit

the like and subscribe buttons while you're over there and check out some of his awesome content.

If you are coming in from What If Art Hiss to watch the first half, welcome to Science

and Futurism with Isaac Arthur or SFIA, and what we'll be doing in this half is trying

to set up the landscape and critical factors that will be influencing the scene, then

Rudyard will try to overlay our existing

geopolitical landscape into those in the second part. The first thing to acknowledge, though,

is that there isn't a single scene or landscape. Space is huge, and it's likely that even the

development of our own solar system will result in a local population of many quadrillions,

scattered around not just the well-known major planets or even the dwarf plants and bigger moons,

but on the millions of minor planets and asteroids, and potentially trillions of artificial habitats.

That's just this solar system too, and does not include the half a trillion siblings it has in this galaxy among the

...