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.

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We often wonder where we might find a truly

sustainable and abundant source of energy, and the answer might turn out to be in the emptiness

all around us. Today we'll be looking at zero point energy, with a particular emphasis on the

type known as vacuum

energy and the Casimir effect, and as usual, we'll be aiming to make these concepts a lot

simpler and intuitive, rather than the mysterious techno-babel presentation they tend to get

in science fiction, and sometimes even in science.

We are going to be discussing some sci-fi examples,

though, so if you've ever wondered how the ZPMs of Stargate-S-G-1 worked, grab a drink

and a snack, settle in for a bit, and hit those like and subscribe buttons. To understand

anything involving zero-point energy or vacuum energy, we need a little bit

of quantum mechanics, and critical to that notion is that the universe seems to have its

equivalent of minimum-sized building blocks or pixels, stuff that you can't cut in half further,

not able to be divided more, which is what the term atom means, although we later found out you could

...