Grabby Aliens & The Fermi Paradox

Grabby Aliens & The Fermi Paradox

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This Episode is brought to you by world Anvil A new model suggests that nearly a quarter   of the Universe is now colonized by a few  thousand grabby alien mega-civilizations,   each one controlling not just millions of  worlds, but millions of galaxies, and that   Humanity will likely join their number shortly,  as the heir to quadrillions of stars and planets.  So, just over a year ago, Robin Hanson and some  colleagues released a paper in the Astrophysical   Journal titled: “If Loud Aliens Explain  Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare”,   which we’ll link in the description, as well as  a website, grabbyaliens.com, and almost as soon   as it came out folks started asking if I’d do a  video on this new solution to the Fermi Paradox,   and I joked that we had already done several. Grabby aliens is a cool mathematical model   but we need to say from the outset that it is  not a new Fermi Paradox Solution, it’s modeling   a trio of variables we have some data on that are  related to civilizations getting out to the stars,   and it seeks to show us that for any plausible  value of those variables, the only one that makes   sense is that alien civilizations don’t pop up  much, that the kind that remain fairly quiet   from an observational standpoint aren’t vastly  more common than the big loud expansionist ones,   and that therefore, humanity doesn’t see  aliens because we’re among the earliest.  It suggests that there might not be any of what  we would consider to be alien civilizations in   this galaxy and that it’s probably half a billion  light years, if not more, much more, to the next   high-tech alien civilization. Alien life isn’t  really rare, it’s just rare right now, and any   alien civilization that emerged in its local  corner of the Universe is very likely to be doing   as we do, wondering where all the other life is,  and concluding that someone had to be the first,   and for that region of space, it was them. The  concept being that life spreads quickly, so, much  

as the first amoeba on Earth might see a whole  empty ocean, it and its offspring would probably   fill that whole ocean before life independently  evolved elsewhere in that ocean again.  Channel regulars know that’s the default  position of this show and it’s the argument   I advanced in Season 1 episode 1, way back in  2015, the Dyson Dilemma, which isn’t a Fermi   Paradox solution either, but supports this same  solution which is the Rare Intelligence camp   of the Rare Earth Hypothesis. This is no surprise,  Robin Hanson is best known in these circles as the   gentleman who gave us the term “Great Filters”.  These describe the various hurdles that life has   to pass through to get from dead young planet  to building rockets, like evolving life,   cellular nuclei, brains, tool use, etc. all while  not being wiped out by asteroids, climate shifts,   supernovae, or older civilizations who come  and take the planet for their own uses.  Now, that wasn’t quite a new idea then either,  Brandon Carter – an astrophysicist best known   on this show for his discussion of the Anthropic  Principle and Doomsday Argument – had discussed   this in the 1980s but had borrowed the term ‘Hard  Steps’ from the medical field. I have rather  

intentionally not reached out to Dr. Hanson before  writing this script, as I’m trying to be properly   critical of the theory; which is hard enough when  it’s strongly backing my own preferred stance on   the Fermi Paradox and it’s written by a man whose  work I respect, so I didn’t want to make that   worse by reaching out for a dialogue, instead,  just reading the paper. As a result, I don’t know   if they opted to use the term Hard Steps instead  of Great Filters, because he had coined that term,   but it has resulted in Hard Steps showing up more  in Fermi Paradox discussions these last several   months and I rather regret that such is the case. I mentioned Hard Steps was borrowed from medicine,  

and there, it is discussing the probability of  mutation on the road to cancer and I hate when   anyone compares humanity to either cancer or a  swarm of locusts when talking about us on this   Planet or heading out into the Galaxy. So I’ve  always avoided the term and prefer Great Filters   and rather hope Hard Steps doesn’t catch on. I’m  also not terribly fond of the term “Grabby Aliens”   as to me at least that puts a negative connotation  on the entire concept of space colonization,   but, fundamentally, both are just nitpicks by  me that have nothing to do with the concept   at hand. It needed a name and it was clearly  catchy, and brought more interest to the topic,   so no complaints, and it’s much more compact than  Aggressively Expanding Civilizations, in keeping   with Jay Olson’s Fermi Paradox paper from 2015,  “Homogeneous cosmology with aggressively expanding   civilizations” it helps make the case that we  can’t just limit our notion to aliens colonizing   one galaxy, but also moving beyond, and as we’ll  see today, the assumption is that grabby aliens   grab a lot more than one galaxy or even thousands. The paper also explicitly rejects the Zoo  

Hypothesis, the idea that Earth is a zoo  and surrounded by aliens who keep themselves   hidden from us, and while that’s fine for  the running of the model, I don’t believe   that’s justified as a conclusion. For the  model, it's kind of necessary, as otherwise,   you could get alien expansion spheres erupting  inside existing ones or you could have aliens   inside another civilization that didn’t know they  were inside of one, and we could easily be one.   See our episode on the Zoo Hypothesis for more  explanation of the pros and cons of that solution. 

That’s the basic intro though, for channel  regulars, this isn’t a new Fermi Paradox solution,   it’s a new model that adds support to the Great  Filters and Rare Earth or Intelligence solutions.   Today we’re going to look at that model, its  assumptions, and some of its strengths and   weaknesses, but overall it’s quite strong, and it  follows from Carter’s own earlier reasoning on the   Anthropic Principle that even though space  travel is slow compared to human lifetimes,   it can be incredibly fast compared  to planetary and stellar lifetimes,   so the first species in a galaxy – or supercluster  even – who get intelligent and gets expansionist   is going to colonize everything in that area  before anybody else arrives on the scene,   because intelligent life and the spawning  of an intelligent, cooperative civilization   from it, isn’t very likely to occur on  worlds in any given galaxy, at a frequency   that is faster than the travel time of colony  ships across that galaxy – or supercluster.  Thus, every species that colonizes a galaxy  started by asking why the place was so empty,   and found out that it was because it actually  was empty before them. Nobody else ever gets the   chance to wonder that because they can’t evolve on  a planet that someone else has already colonized   or disassembled for building materials. They  can’t peer into the night sky and wonder if  

anyone lives around those stars because those  stars aren’t visible to the naked eye any more,   they’re surrounded in Dyson Swarms, and at  most, your world is a protected nature reserve   they left behind or uploaded into a computer  simulation or has been pushed into a pocket   Universe of its own by higher technology. And we’ve discussed those options and many   others in our Fermi Paradox series and our  Alien Civilizations series, and to save time,   we’ll reference some of those episodes as we go  for those wanting more discussion on the matter.  So, the paper mentions Loud Aliens and  Quiet Aliens, and for general context,   Quiet Aliens are those who  contribute to the Great Silence,   The Great Silence is the observed condition of the  Universe by modern astronomy and SETI – the search   for extraterrestrial intelligence – that we don’t  see anyone, and the basis for the Fermi Paradox,   which is the question of why we don’t see any  civilizations in the vast and ancient universe.   Why we see this Great Silence? Quiet aliens are,  by definition, the only kind we currently observe,   since they preserve the Fermi Paradox, and Loud  Aliens are what we are looking for with SETI. 

For the purpose of the paper though,  loud aliens have 3 characteristics:   they expand fast, they last a long time, and  they make visible changes to the places they go,   like terraforming planets and building  megastructures and Dyson swarms   and so on. Quiet aliens are those that  don’t do at least one of those three,   maybe they don’t expand or do so very slowly even  on cosmological timelines, maybe they ceased to   exist, blew themselves up for instance, or they  don’t really leave a footprint where they go,   like a non-technological species of giant whales  that lived on gas giants or inside stars which   might migrate between them at a galactic scale  and still not leave anything behind we would see.  And of course, there are dozens of different  methods or exceptions to each of these conditions,   but critically, none of them really discuss  technology, motives, or culture of aliens   involved, only the most general condition and  one that we can see, a species that expands fast,   lasts long, and leaves marks. Making  them easy for us to notice, or loud.  Grabby Aliens in the paper are those which, quote  “(a) expand the volumes they control at a common   speed, (b) clearly change the look of their  volumes (relative to uncontrolled volumes),   (c) are born according to a power law in time  except not within other GC volumes, and (d) do   not die unless displaced by other GCs ” unquote. Let’s unpack that. 

First, a GC is a galactic civilization, and we  may extend that to include Intergalactic ones too,   or even multiverse-traveling ones. Indeed based  on the model’s results, a GC in this context   is likely to be a multi-million galaxy empire  rather than a civilization inside a galaxy or   controlling an entire one, what GC usually means  and what we call a Kardashev 3 or K3 civilization,   and I’d suggest maybe the civilizations in  this model should be considered K4 instead.  Second, this is all about setting up a computer  model of various origin planets of various aliens   randomly distributed at a given density, and each  with a random expansion speed and duration, in   order to see how likely we are to be first in our  region of space, and if so, what that indicates   about how often that loud, grabby aliens occur and  run into each other. From the model they typically   expand to get to a million or so galaxies  before running into neighboring expansion waves. 

That quote from a moment ago is them setting up  the parameters. So, we have expanding volumes   under their control at a common speed. What does  that mean? In this case, it means that every GC,   once it starts expanding, will move at  the same speed the whole time – until it   bumps into a neighbor – and that all those  neighbors move outward at the same speed.   That’s got some problems we’ll get to in a  moment, but models always need to simplify   some variables. We’ll be pointing out  some of those simplifications today too,  

and some might matter for the  conclusion but probably not this one.   We assume ships will get faster with time and  thus colonization rates outward would speed up   but at the scale involved, that probably would  be maxed out long before it really mattered.  A few thousand years of spaceship propulsion  improvements to get from 1% light speed ships,   up to 80%, matters a lot in a system where  civilizations all start popping up within   a few thousand years of each other and  expanding a few thousand light years,   like we see in the typical space opera of  hundreds of aliens in a galactic region, but   it really doesn’t matter at extragalactic scales  of millions of years of travel time or more.   We assume the same physics applies Universe-wide  and that loud aliens are curious ones too,   where science is concerned, and thus  work to improve their ship drives   until everyone ends up with that  same optimized engine concept.  From a practical standpoint, that means that all  the expanding bubbles of new GCs expand at the   same rate from their homeworld even if not from  the same start date. In practice it would seem  

like what will actually matter for colonization  will be if there’s a maximum safe speed to travel   between galaxies, as most of our expansion time  in this model is intergalactic colonization   and K3 civilizations, or even K2, really  shouldn’t have any problem building powerful   and long enough acceleration ramps to let  ships reach 99% of light speed for that voyage,   but that might be too much for safe travel on  voyages lasting several million years. Barring   that, it would be my expectation that at the  intergalactic scale colonization occurs at .99c,   a tiny fraction slower than light speed. A possible caveat, however, is that intergalactic   space is orders of magnitude emptier than  interstellar space, so it may just allow   for higher cruising speeds after all, owing to the  lower risk of dust collisions. See our generation   ships series and Intergalactic Colonization  episode for more discussion of that, including   hurling planet-sized ships out of the galaxy,  or moving galaxies back here for harvesting. 

Second bit, B, that grabby aliens  clearly change the look of their volumes   (relative to uncontrolled volumes), is easy  enough to understand. Uncontrolled volumes or   natural volumes of space not yet colonized will be  recognizably different by astronomy than those the   aliens have reached and colonized or otherwise  utilized, like building Dyson Swarms around   every star or giant beacons or any number of other  megastructures, or even just sucking bits of space   dry for bringing back to their homeworld – or  home dimension, we don’t want to take for granted   that our Universe is the only board in the  game, though understandably the paper does this,   for simplicity I assume. And condition B basically  amounts to saying when you colonize a place it   looks different then when it was untouched. Third, grabby aliens are born according to   a power law in time, except not within other GC  volumes. Which means the older the Universe gets,  

the more likely any random spot not already  occupied by a GC is going to produce intelligent   life. More stars have formed, more heavy elements  of big planets, older planets with more time for   life to have emerged and evolved. And the model  will effectively argue that no new GCs would be   emerging after about 4 billion years from now, as  the whole Universe should be full of other GCs,   even in very pessimistic occurence and  growth rates. In terms of the model,  

it means the longer it runs, the faster new  intelligences are appearing in unoccupied space,   but that they do not appear inside already  occupied space. Or where they might, that   they would just expand at the same speed as part  of that wider GC from a practical perspective.  And again, they reject the Zoo Hypothesis  here, for the purpose of the model at least.  

There are a lot of good objections to that, but  they mostly should not matter for that model.   For instance, us getting killed off by  Artificial Intelligence of our own devising   in the next few thousands years; doesn’t matter  to this model anymore than if it takes us a   century or a hundred centuries to perfect our  spaceship drives, in terms of maximum speed.   Us getting replaced by AI or by a human-descendant  clade or by some terran or alien species   we found and uplifted - supersmart dolphins for  instance – just changes that GC marker to either   shift it to be quiet aliens or still loud aliens  but with a different profile pic, so to speak.   Same business, new owners. Lastly we have D, that a   grabby alien civilization or empire does not die  unless displaced by other GCs, which is that, GCs,   once they get rolling off their homeworld, just  aren’t going to evaporate away. They might have   that AI rebellion that replaces them but if you’re  spread out to a thousand worlds and growing,   only an AI that wanted to do the same would  really be a threat, as opposed to parking on   the colony world they rebelled on. Indeed, you  getting chased out by pursuing waves of angry AI  

or uplifted chimps is a pretty good way to  encourage fast and loud colonization too.   As we discussed in our Extragalactic Sanctuaries  episode, where we had folks colonizing whole   star systems and turning them into giant  fortresses and death traps, merely because   they are running in retreat across the galaxy,  hurling quintillions of ships and troops at the   invader just to slow them down and distract them. An expanding GC is not implied to be unified here,   just that any given elements near its current  frontier edge tend to be prone to expanding   that frontier, even if on various sides of that  GC’s bubble, none of them have ever spoken to   each other or know much about the other side  of the frontier, nor do they even necessarily   still resemble one another. A million years of  evolution, genetic engineering, and cybernetics,   might mean that the ‘humans’ expanding into the  Western part of the galaxy resemble those on the   Eastern Fringe no more than a cougar resembles  a shark, for all they are ancient relatives.  Now, once they began running these simulations  with different values for the parameters   and in random setups over and over, the evidence  tilted to us being about in the middle of Galactic   Civilization emergence, which would seem to  be 4 billion years ago to 4 billions years   from now, and that GCs already controlled about a  fifth to a quarter of the observable Universe and   generally colonized outward at nearly 80% of light  speed. That the light of expansion evidence has  

reached 35% of the known Universe and we’re in the  roughly 65% that can’t see another GC yet. Most GC   Bubbles, as they expand and maximize like a big  bubble in a sink or bath touching many others,   will be bigger than our GC bubble, with 62% being  bigger than humanity’s eventual GC. Not that we’ll   be crowded, we’ll probably have a volume of  space at least as big as our whole supercluster   of 100,00 galaxies before we bump into another  GC. Roughly 7000 GCs will appear in an Observable  

Universe-Sized Volume. As usual we do not know  how big the entire Universe is, possibly it is   infinite. We assume the Observable Universe is  relatively small compared to it and in this case,   that portion would have 7000 GCs. Note that  this is essentially the approach of looking for   the most crowded Universe that fits the data and  model, nothing in this says that GCs can’t be even   more spread out than that, nor does it imply that  Earth isn’t the only place life ever appeared,   we may be be 1 in gajillion, this model just seeks  to say we are not less than one in a quintillion,   in terms of stars giving rise to GCs. We might be  civilization 100 to appear, not 4000-or-something,   or even #1. Though we expect the model to roll  out the same, it would just shift from 10-18  

billions after the Big Bang to more like 13 to 20. We had reached that parallel conclusion in the   Dyson Dilemma discussion way back when the show  started and it’s a logical extrapolation of prior   work, all the way back to at least Michael Hart in  the 1970s, who coined the term the Fermi Paradox,   and argued that since interstellar travel seemed  increasingly plausible and biological life   should be prone to wanting to expand,  intelligent life had to be very rare   or we should see it way more often. In our case, we looked it at with as   little math as I could get away with, just as  today I’m trying to skip as much as we can,   and we also looked at it from the angle of how far  off we could see expansion occurring given that a   species that emerged 4 billion years ago as a GC  needs to be less than 4 billion light years from   us for us to have seen that emergence; Indeed,  a good deal closer due to Hubble expansion,   but Hanson et al does it much more  rigorously and mathematically than we did   and it's very nice to see this properly  modeled at the intergalactic scale.  And as is normal for these lines of reasoning,  it is assuming that faster-than-light travel   is not possible, which bugs many folks, but as a  reminder, FTL only exacerbates the Fermi Paradox,   as it means that a civilization appearing 10,000  years ago in the Andromeda Galaxy could already   have colonized our galaxy, as opposed to the  multi-million year journey otherwise required.  

You should be able to run this same model at  various superluminal expansion speeds and the   result would just be to expand those individual GC  bubbles and thus imply GCs were even less common.  Now, in a lot of the discussion around Grabby  Aliens I see folks bringing up how it mentions   that our star and planet have a much shorter  window for life than normal, with the majority   of stars being red dwarfs that can live a trillion  years or more, and with our planet likely to   become uninhabitable inside another billions years  or so. Channel regulars know we’ve discussed ways   to extend a star’s lifetime, and that we wouldn’t  expect GCs to really be bound by star lifetimes or   types much once they got rolling, but honestly  I didn’t see the relevance of star lifetime   to the discussion at all. We don’t know how likely  life-bearing worlds are to form around red dwarf   stars compared to yellow ones, but, longer-lived  stars being able to spawn their first civilization   far later, say 100 billion years after forming,  really would only matter if it turned out that   it is less likely for intelligent life to  form on worlds around those longer-lived   stars than it is for intelligent life to form  on worlds around yellow, orange, or white stars. 

We could stretch that, our Sun has been getting  hotter every year we’re around it, as stars do,   growing slowly brighter over time, and thus  the habitable zone of a system will change.   Red Dwarf’s planets really don’t have this  issue, they are slow to age and brighten,   but it might be that stars much bigger than our  own sun, while likely having far more planets   and bigger habitable zones, may brighten too  fast to allow life to be sustained on them,   so that even stars that live 5 billion years  couldn’t have intelligent life emerge on them even   though our own sun only is 4.6 billion years old. The obvious problem of course is that, at no fault   to the authors, we just don’t know much about  alien life yet, and we probably will get to   find some examples of unintelligent life before we  come across what is indisputably-intelligent life   or other GCs. Indeed, under this model  you would expect to have the leading edge   of your GC run into more primitive worlds or  even smaller proto-GC bubbles far more often than   it runs into full GCs, as it still works under  the usual assumption that the time between now,   and us colonizing every star in this galaxy,  is on a similar order of magnitude, as how   long since we discovered fire. A million years  to go from fire to rocket ships, and a million   years to go from them to galactic dominance. To me, that’s a bit more permissible for the   Zoo Hypothesis, as, first off, we are not  really assuming any real relation or rapport   between elements of a GC besides maybe  locally within a few hundred light years.  

Nobody really sits around waiting thousands of  years to get an email back from all the mutants   living in their tiny corner of the galaxy for  instructions on how they should handle this new   planet they found with smart slugs on it, and  by that point in time there would probably be   accepted branches of humanity that bore less  resemblance to you than those smart slugs.  In that regard, I don’t think expanding GCs are  necessarily bad for younger worlds near them. In   a system with many competing and rival interests  – like a GC or even a small piece of its expanding   frontier – extermination policies don’t work  well, on top of being monstorus. Nothing can be  

done in secret, and now all your neighbors know  you’re a bunch of genocidal maniacs and even if   you’re all derived from the same homeworld  and that initial spacefaring civilization   was entirely fine with exterminating aliens,  you’ve diverged beyond that and you also know   the universe has other GCs at that point and have  to worry about them knowing what you did when you   do inevitably run into them and also while knowing  that you cannot do it to them quite as easily,   since they will likely to be expecting it even  more so if they’ve seen you do it once before. In   a non-FTL and expanding universe, there’s no real  winning percentage for an eternal expansion into   your neighbors at the Supercluster scale, even if  you began with a billion year headstart over them.  So, I don’t see rolling over other younger worlds  and burning them really happening universally,   and more importantly, I just wouldn’t  expect a single GC to have a universal   policy on encountering primitive worlds, let  alone every GC having an identical policy.   Probably just absorb and add into  the local interstellar ecosystem,   and if there’s a tendency for GCs to go  post-human, or post-alien and inorganic,   then it's entirely possible nobody would  care if their neighbor had evolved from smart   slugs rather than a monkey like them, just one  more icky option they don’t like to dwell on.  For the math-inclined I really do recommend  the paper, and I want to emphasize that you   should not be taking away from this that Hanson  et al have gone and proven it is possible to   travel at 80% of light speed economically or that  there are 7000 intergalactic empires out there,   and that roughly 4000 have already emerged and  we’re next. That there’s a little under three  

thousand whose galactic capital homeworlds are  busy somewhere between developing photosynthesis   and discovering fire, while some of the older ones  already have empires a billion lightyears wide.   Relatively minor changes to the numbers or  additions of other parameters, or more or   less hard steps could alter the dynamic a lot.  And for all that it's essentially extrapolating   off the Anthropic Principle, the Mediocrity  Principle is still in a lot of the basic concepts   and it seems rather normal that we’d  end up in the middle of the distribution   like that. Each GC presumably has run this same  model and gotten similar results, adjusted a bit   for the age of the Universe when they ran it,  whether they were #1 or 4000 or 7000 in truth.  But if the thousand oldest and biggest GCs had  already settled 10% of the Observable Universe   between them, then that means they’d average 20  Billion-Billion Stars each, and given that we   were talking about the Kardashev Scale last week  and I’m sure that’s brought up the idea of K4   civilizations, it always does, we are going to go  ahead and semi-officially dub a GC of this size,   a K4 civilization, which is a bit ironic since  again GC is short for Galactic Civilizations   and those are the definition of  a K3 or Kardashev 3 civilization.  

Maybe we should call them an Average Hanson  Bubble or GAC, Grabby Alien Civilization, K4,   though if anyone has a better and appropriate  acronym, let me know in the comments below.  In the meantime, while again, it’s  not conclusive proof of anything,   and we already mentioned some exceptions and  have discussed other ones in other episodes,   I do think it shows us a fairly plausible model of  what our Universe and its civilizations look like.   And it’s one that (on paper) almost guarantees us  at least a few galaxies and trillions of stars to   ourselves, if not a few million galaxies, which  is about as far as we can probably expand at this   point in our Universe’s age and expansion. The one big take away from the model though,   and the Rare Intelligence solution to the Fermi  Paradox, is that us and any other alien who’s   smart enough to be able to look up at the night  sky and see stars and wonder what they are,   has a good chance of becoming the ancestors  of a civilization which will control every   one of those dots of light, even the smudgy  ones that represent neighboring galaxies.   That if they proclaim that all that they can see  is theirs, then they will turn out to be right   if they only put the effort into earning it, and  aren’t so foolish as to destroy themselves first.   And if they do, there are many  worlds waiting in the wings to rise   and take their forfeited place a  few million years down the road. 

And hopefully, we won’t forfeit  our place among the stars. So today we saw a theory that makes a strong  case for humanity having at least as many   worlds free for us to claim as there are  living humans, and indeed many times over,   even if that future is still centuries ahead  and trillions of miles away. Thankfully,   we already have endless worlds at our fingertips  that we can behold through the mind’s eye,   and one of our great assets as a people is  our ability to share those with each other.   I think it is easy to forget sometimes just how  awesome it is to be able to share stories and   tales and imagined worlds with each other, and  I was reminded of that recently as my gaming   group had been on hiatus for some months and we  finally had a chance to start a new campaign. 

If you’ve ever had occasion to roll some  20-sided dice around in some pen and paper RPG   or their computer and online version, then you  probably know what I mean. And those shared   settings can become amazingly complex, the game  we just restarted returns us to a campaign setting   we’ve been playing on and off again now for almost  20 years and I was very glad to have World Anvil,   the award winning worldbuilding toolset, to  help. It made it easy to transfer our various   remaining notes in a dozen different formats  into a collected and easily accessible format.   It was also the first time one of our  players had seen World Anvil in action   and they said almost word for word the same  thing I said when I first started using it,   “I wish this existed when I first started gaming”. I love the ability to upload many different   setting maps and link them together along with  articles, whether they’re text and images I’ve   carefully written or even just a photo snapshot  of some old notes I had but don't have time to   retype and reformat, it just makes it so easy  to tie all my notes together and add more and   do it in a way that’s not only easy for me to work  with, but easy for my players to navigate through,   and easy for me to lockout materials they  shouldn’t be able to see yet or which only   certain players should see. And while its  highly versatile, world anvil also makes lots   of standardized gaming needs like timelines,  genealogies, map-connecting, character sheets,   and articles on people and places very easy. But the newest feature of World Anvil that  

I loves is their whiteboards, it's a canvas  for connecting articles, diagrams like family   trees or hierarchies, tavern boards, mindmaps,  and character arc development. There are just   so many features that make worldbuilding and  sharing easier and better, with world anvil,   but the very best feature is all their easy  online tutorial videos that not only show you   how to do everything, but give endless ideas for  uses you might not think of on your own, that will   just keep making your setting better and better. With world anvil, you can elevate your setting,   whether it's for a game, podcast, or a novel, to  a whole new level. If you would like to give World   Anvil a try and let it help you forge new worlds,  just click the link in this episode’s description! So that will wrap us up for September  and the eighth year of SFIA,   and we’re heading into October to start year 9 by  looking at the idea of colonizing planetary rings,   like Saturn’s, and if life might be able to evolve  in such places. Then we’ll ask the question of   what we do if all these options for space travel  never pan out, and we are stuck here on Earth,   and then we’ll have our Scifi Sunday episode  to look at what happens if space travel   does indeed pan out and what strange  alien environments we might encounter.  

Possibly on your own Personal Spaceship,  which we’ll look at on October 20th.  If you want alerts when those and other episodes  come out, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel   and hit the notifications bell. And if you  enjoyed today’s episode, and would like   help support future episodes, please visit our  website, Isaac Arthur.net, for ways to donate,   or become a show patron over at Patreon. Those  and other options, like our awesome social media  

forums for discussing futuristic concepts,  can be found in the links in the description.  Until next time, thanks for  watching, and have a great week!

2022-10-03 05:02

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