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.

To hear it and every episode early and add 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 Brilliant.

Humanity has many ambitions to reach upward to the stars, but those ambitions are only

as strong as the materials those foundations are built on.

So today we'll be looking at what advances in materials we may see in the next generational century, though we will also leap distantly into the future near the end to discuss the near

magic materials we hope future science might give us a path to. Materials so strong they make steel seem like warm butter.

Now we often do deep dives on certain topics here on science and futurism with Isaac Arthur,

like we did in our focus look at graphene last year, or metamaterials a few years back.

However, today's topic is a bit broader, and so we will be touching on many different topics

and many different applications.

We'll be looking at objects that emit smells or light when exposed to air, advances in aero gels,

smart materials, self-reparing ones, programmable matter, zero-g materials, new uses for liquid crystals, two-dimensional

materials like graphene, but less known, plus many more.

Some of them, like graphene, probably do deserve their own episodes, and so we'll

follow this episode with a poll over on the channel's community page to pick one of these

topics, so it will get its own dedicated episode in a few months. In the meantime, though, we've got a lot to cover in a single

episode, so grab a drink and a snack. There is a tendency to think of super materials

in terms of those which are super strong that you can hang a building from a string of,

or which could survive a tank battalion

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