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 add free, plus hours of bonus content,

check out go.nebola.t.v.t.v.

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 FTR 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 under known science.

So I thought today we'd 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 allow it 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 topics we'll cover in order are warping space-time, negative mass, spaceship

proportion, force fields and shields, reversing universal expansion, matter creation,

...