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 ad-free, plus hours of bonus content, check out

go.nebola.tv slash Isaac Arthur and use my code, Isaac Arthur.

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 babble 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-SG-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 go to protons, neutrons, electrons, and the proton and neutron down into quarks.

You've probably heard that a proton or neutron is made of three quarks too, and this is

mostly wrong, and we'll get to Y shortly, but the reason why it's wrong is critical to

our topic today.

Currently though, we believe electrons are not divisible and neither are quarks, that they

are fundamental particles, though plenty

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