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.

Many folks wonder if our civilization will ever reach utopia and satisfy all our wants and needs,

but just as many people wonder if trying to do so might itself bring about the fall of our civilization.

Oh, me, ever, civilization. A lot of discussion of the future tends to revolve around the notion that technology

has the potential to bring us into a golden age where everyday needs like hunger are

vague memories of the past. This is often called a post-scarcy

civilization and it's a blanket term for a point where civilization has such abundance that

many of our problems just go away. A few months back I was asked what the future would

be like if this never came to pass and a poor of the audience said there was a lot of interest

in this scenario so I thought we would explore it today. Though at the, and a poll of the audience said there was a lot of interest in this scenario,

so I thought we would explore it today.

Though at the same time, a lot of our discussion is going to be how this fate isn't likely,

and that post-scarcity is where we are headed, and sooner than later.

Now, we need to start by acknowledging a problem.

There's the basic concept of post-scarcitycity and there's the way the channel defines it for ease

of discussion.

Technically a post-scarcy civilization is one in which there is no scarcity of any resource, and

even ignoring that we live in a finite universe, we usually view this as impossible, as certain

things will always be scarce.

...