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

The goal of science is to understand and master the universe around us,

but could our skill grow so great that we could learn to warp reality itself?

Possibly one of the hardest truths about shifting from science fiction to a science-realistic

look at

exploring and settling the galaxy is that leaping around the place at faster than light speed

is probably never going to be possible. Still, there are some hypothetical technologies

like Warp Drive that seem to offer the possibility of FTL travel, moving around the galaxy

in years, or maybe even days or moments.

However, we focus so much on this aspect of those sorts of technologies that we often overlook

what other things warping space and time might allow, and some of these are even possible

unknown science. So I thought today we contemplate how we warp space, how we might be able

to, if we ever

got our hands on negative mass or energy, and some of the cool technologies allowed under

both known science and some more hypothetical options.

We will not just be talking about warping space and time, as there are other quantities

or qualities we might change, like probability and luck. We will be looking at everything

from FTL to perpetual motion machines, or how to make enormous storage spaces, and the major

...