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.nebler.tv slash Isaac Arthur and use my code, Isaac Arthur.

This episode is sponsored by Skillshare.

Carbon is the fundamental building block of life, but it may soon be the fundamental building

block of the rest of the world too.

So today we're going to be looking at graphene, ultra-thin flat sheets of a super strong substance that folks have been talking about the potential of for over a decade now.

We'll be looking at what technologies it's useful, what its impact on our economy and civilization

could be, and why

the hype around it has died down somewhat.

This episode is probably a bit more technical than our usual content, but hopefully it

doesn't fall too flat, even if that pun, probably did.

Let's start with some basics.

Graphene is an allotrope of carbon.

Allotropes are the various forms of a single element that differ only by how the atoms

are arranged and bonded to each other.

Oxygen has aletropes of O2 that we breathe and ozone, O3, that protects us from the sun's

ultraviolet rays.

Phosphorus has a lot tropes of amorphous red phosphorus,

in which the atoms bond to each other but not in any regular repeating structure, and white

phosphorus or tetraphosphorus, in which each molecule contains four atoms bonded in a tetrahedral

...