We know the dangers of Science and Technology and how they might mask doomsdays as hidden treasures, but could the very quest for knowledge, or the existence of the conscious mind itself, be a ticking time bomb waiting to wipe us out? Once, long ago, some human first looked up at the stars and wondered what they were, and how vast that celestial sphere was, and if it might be home to other peoples or the gods themselves. As we grew in knowledge we began to realize just how immense and ancient the cosmos truly were, and wondered if life might have arisen out on those distant and uncountable worlds. Surely many are like our own pale blue dot, and such planets must number into the untold billions, yet we see no ironclad signs of the mighty empires that should dwell among the stars and be impossible to mistake for any natural phenomena. This seeming paradox, an ancient and immense universe, and yet a quiet one, is known as the Great Silence or the Fermi Paradox. Many
solutions are proposed, including that these aliens are indeed present and hide from us, or we choose to ignore the evidence of them. But the largest collection of solutions revolve around the idea that civilizations like ours either evolve very rarely, filtered out by many challenges and conditions that make Earth Rare, early filters on life emerging, or middle filters that prevent the rise of complex, Intelligent, or Technological life. The other side of that are what we call the Late Filters, those which our civilization has not yet encountered or fully passed, and which might explain the Great Silence not by civilizations being rare, but by them being short-lived or unable to engage in interstellar travel. There’s not much paradox if it turns out every civilization self-destructs in a few centuries or that they can’t colonize much beyond their homeworld, at least so long as intelligent life doesn’t develop so regularly that virtually every planet develops it and redevelops it again and again when they do blow themselves up, if they don’t utterly sterilize their whole planet in the process. We discussed that scenario in Earth: After Humanity, and many of the other filter options, early, middle, or late, have their own focused episodes that detail the science and arguments for and against that filter. Indeed, we looked at examples of technological timebombs in its own episode a couple years back, and while we’ll touch on them today, including some we skipped or skimmed then, our focus is on different kinds, including those that might be inherent to all intelligent species simply by existing.
That perhaps intelligence itself is the timebomb, and not simply because it opens the door to inventing dangerous technologies. And today we’ll be focusing on these theories, as opposed to technological timebombs specifically or our other timebomb parallel of psychic poisons, mindsets a civilization might develop that bring on self-destruction or a stasis and stagnation state that they stay in or constantly return to, such as concerns the possibility of a civilization becoming nihilistic might doom them, which we examined some months back in Nihilistic Aliens. But at a fundamental level, when it comes to late filters, they tend to break into doomsdays wrecking mankind, or alien cousins, or reasons we or they can’t or wouldn’t spread out to space. Most of those doomsdays seem avoidable and we’d tend to think at least some civilizations would navigate through them. Your personal cynicism and mileage may vary, but to me the majority of
doomsdays on the horizon are the sorts of things that at most set us back for a generation, while most of the remainder would seem like a choice you could make. Let’s say wrecking your environment, spawning a homicidal AI, or nuking yourself till every beach was turned into glass that glowed in the dark, was a simple 50/50 gamble as to whether or not a civilization hit the brakes or went off the cliff. So with three of them, that is a 1 in 8 chance you avoid all three and survive playing with fire. Although some might say, as we’ll discuss in a bit, that playing with
fire in the first place already doomed us. But 1 in 8 means even if there were only a thousand civilizations in a galaxy that had to clear these hurdles or late filters, that 125 that made it through. And even if the odds of surviving each were only 1 in 10, then you still have 1 in a thousand clear that hurdle and there’s still someone in the galaxy that beat us to the stars. And that still only implies intelligent civilizations arose on less than 1 in a million of the plausible planets in this galaxy, and even that’s assuming only a billion planets in this galaxy are decent earth-parallels on which life might plausibly arise. We’re generally not talking about late filters that murder off millions of civilizations at a 99.99999% failure rate. Rather, the assumption is usually that the very long catalog of early and
middle filters thins the numbers down a lot. For practical purposes, once you get the odds of the typical star system producing a Fermi Paradox ending event - colonizing an astronomically visible chunk of a galaxy basically - down to one in a sextillion - 10 to the 21st - you don’t need anything beyond that because barring faster than light travel, it would be very unlikely one those emergent civilizations arose at a place and time where the light from it would have reached us yet. Thus, no Fermi Paradox. It is amazing how fast those odds can start stacking up. We had a video way back in the early days where we just went through 50 well known candidates for filters that people generally thought were more likely than not to thin the numbers down and at 50/50 odds the cumulative result is less than one in a quadrillion, 10 to the 15th. It could be a lot lower than that from those
filters too, 50/50 is generally optimistic, but it could be way better too. And yet some filters, if true, could individually drop the odds to flat out zero, minus scenarios like a Boltzmann Brain. We assume they’re wrong since we already passed them ourselves, but we haven’t passed them all. AI is sometimes thought to be one of them, but it's not a great Fermi Paradox filter because we tend to assume an AI, if it wiped us out, would probably replace us and proceed to colonize space. Maybe not all AI does, maybe 90% of AI that wipe out their makers just fall over in a depressed heap or existential crisis, but probably not all. And yet, when we talk about time bombs in a Fermi
Paradox context, while we typically envision technology like AI that’s just so attractive you adopt it without even realizing you cut your own throat, we can also mean entirely existential problems that cause civilizations to inevitably collapse. Indeed, some make the case that the inevitable self-destructive act civilizations commit is arising in the first place, and the road to civilization and technology is one that always leads to ruin. Peter Watts, in his excellent novel Blindsight, even suggests sentient higher intelligence is an anomaly that rapidly goes away. We also can’t dismiss any danger we see now but haven't actually avoided yet as an example of a potential timebomb, ticking away waiting to catch us. While nukes seem less an inevitable end of mankind than many felt in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, it’s still there and more nations have them then ever before. So too,
while we have made huge strides in creating technologies that cut down on waste, pollution, and emissions, we are still doing quite a lot of them, so declaring victory is premature and so is assuming we will or that anybody else did. Though for my part I think we will and that most do, of course I am rather notorious for being a techno-optimist, and an optimist in general, even though I personally have never regarded myself as either. And AI is certainly a threat currently dominating the horizon and not one anyone dismisses. However, it’s a good example of a non-technological timebomb, in the sense that any civilization might create other intelligences which pose a threat to them but not necessarily a replacement species for the purpose of the Fermi Paradox. What can be done with AI can be presumably also be done with selective breeding, and a civilization might take itself out by simply by creating intelligent labor animals, or breeding for simple-minded and obedient people, either intentionally like in a Brave New World, or by inevitable accident like in the movie Idiocracy. Often by time bombs though we mean ones that are so attractive you can’t not use them once you find them, and to which no warning of danger is given. Imagine a portal someone made in a lab that could
bring energy in from some other universe but every twenty or so years flipped polarity and turned into explosive anti-matter. So everyone has time to adapt to using it casually the same as we do batteries, and then boom, every single device running on one blows with the force of a nuke. Now we can never rule something like that out, like the Zoo Hypothesis or Simulation Hypothesis of the Fermi Paradox, the very nature of the problem makes it not only impossible to disprove, but also limits the ability of any outsider to forewarn us. In this case,
everyone dies the moment they found out. There could be some incredibly attractive and harmless seeming technology already in play or waiting for discovery but discussing it serves little purpose, if it were something you could discover and avoid, it wouldn't be a great Fermi Paradox filter. Or more especially a Great Filter of the Fermi Paradox, which are the types of filters we view as so constraining that your odds of making it through are similar to winning the lottery, if not worse. All we can advise on these is that a civilization be mindful of caution signs, things too good to be true or which might be so addictive that even if we later find out they are harmful, we might trick ourselves into disbelief, and again we covered the more technological options in technological timebombs a couple years back. But any technology that would instantly allow you to colonize huge chunks of the Universe are rather suspect, since it implies no one else has them, either because no one else exists or they did exist, and they did discover that technology and it ruined them. But what about ones like intelligence or complexity being inherently harmful, or technology being a trap at a basic level? What’s the reasoning there? First, I should note that it’s hard to say if these would qualify as late filters since they involve steps we already took, but since a late filter is one that hits after our present date, which hasn’t been reached yet, I would still say these all qualify as late filters, at least for when they’d be unavoidable. Some may be avoidable and already avoided and thus could be a mid-stage filter.
Let’s start with Peter Watts’ case from his novel Blindsight. It’s an excellent read and this will include some spoilers so be warned. Watts himself is a marine biologist and his aliens in the novel are quite creative and believable while extraordinary, but in many ways it’s his portrayal of human intelligence and variants that really strikes home. The novel’s early focus is on an exploratory crew approaching a brown dwarf in the Oort Cloud nicknamed Big Ben that seems to be the origin of a wave of alien probes that reached Earth. They get hailed on radio as they approach and talk in a variety of human languages. The book is from 2006
so the focus is on whether or not they’re talking to a Chinese Room, something not conscious but mimicking it well, but in modern context they realize the communication is from ChatGPT. And for those who remember a lot of us referencing the novel when ChatGPT and earlier incarnations were brand new, it was because the novel nailed it with creepy accuracy. But once they decide it’s not conscious and just a sophisticated automated response system, they decide to ignore its warnings not to approach further and it lights them up and starts cursing at them and mocking them for thinking it wasn’t conscious. The aliens we soon encounter when they do land start making it very ambiguous how smart they are, and discussion revolves around the difference between intelligence and consciousness and philosophical zombies. A philosophical zombie, or p-zombie, is a person - or alien or computer - used for a thought experiment where they are identical to a normal person but do not have conscious experiences. The usual example being it can’t feel pain but if you jab it with a stick or hot needle, it would react the same as you or I. The aliens they encounter frequently seem to do things that would
indicate they’re conscious, and indeed display speed of thought far faster than the human speed, but constantly leave telltales that they are created or evolved to be unconscious, and indeed the book makes the case that consciousness is an evolutionary fluke and not necessarily a beneficial one. Let’s step through some of the reasoning presented, but first, the novel’s name, blindsight, refers to the condition where vision is non-functional for the conscious brain - you are blind - but you can still react to visual stimuli at a nonconscious level and indeed faster than your conscious reactions. Essentially the relevant notion is that your conscious mind is a committee sitting down to discuss a problem in depth, and a lot of times that is an expensive and dangerously slow approach to handle a problem. You don’t want to consciously decide if you should leap out of the way of a train, for instance, since it will take longer to think on that then your reflexes will need to move you. Decisions take time and can lock you down, and as an amusing example of that, I’m recording this right after a cleaning at my dentist’s, and when I was asked to sign a receipt on my way out, the receptionist gestured to a set off pens on my left, and I started to reach for it, then she pointed to another set on my right, and if took me a few seconds to break out of the sudden hesitation this caused as I tried to decide what to do. I was already leaning and reaching to the left, but I am right-handed, so normally I would have reached with my right hand for a pen.
My brain had decided to call a committee and have a discussion and a vote. We’ve discussed this in our episode on using robots in warfare, and how a lot of times you want to program for very simple and fast because complex is slower and will often lose. They’re too slow on the draw, so to speak. The rebuttal is that a lot of dangers, especially those involving other intelligent actors, can not be handled properly by reflexive action on a predetermined script, and while that may be true, I tend to think so anyway, it doesn’t dismiss that a lot of problems can be handled by scripts, especially if you can load very large scripts back and forth between members of that species or inherit them.
And as I mentioned in one of Shorts right after Dune 2 came out, wonderful movie incidentally, inherited or genetic memory doesn't work with our biology but we do pass on instinctive knowledge and a different biology might allow a much higher bandwidth or total on passing information along. Our main survival advantage of intelligence, pre-technology, is that we can imagine ways to die so that we don’t actually have to do them. We can think of potential ways to get injured or outcomes to actions and build a script for them in advance. Indeed this is generally my
approach to futurism, I try to think of ways to kill a civilization off, and once I do, I try to think of ways to navigate around that. The late Charles Munger, the well-known investor, apparently used this same tactic when he was in the military with airplanes and later in handling companies, he began by trying to figure out ways to crash the airplane, then try to avoid paths that could lead there. I’ve found this approach is good in normal life strategies too, from relationships to work, figure out what might kill a thing then avoid going near it. Intelligence’s usefulness in terms of technology mostly came later, as other than fire and sharpened sticks, discovered a million years ago or more, most of the time we had huge brains compared to even our primate cousins, we had to justify that very expensive piece of equipment and it was mostly in that ability to imagine and ruminate. Indeed even language is thought to be a relatively new innovation, maybe 200,000 years old, at least in terms of being significantly more sophisticated than what Great Apes have now, and either way, those are big advantages that helped us pay for that brain before metal-working, pottery, and agriculture came in.
But other than language, fire just for cooking and staying warm is no big deal to a critter with a good fur coat or from a more temperate climate or planet. So too, a sharp stick is no advantage to a creature with sharp claws. Indeed, we see tool usage even with non-mammals so it doesn’t require huge brains, and a much simpler but dedicated chunk of that brain could allow a very simple organism to act with the accuracy of a sniper when it comes to tossing sharp rocks or sticks at predators or prey. So the only advantage of consciousness that would seem like it couldn’t be evolved separately without much brains is that ability to contemplate and ruminate, prepare scripts for dangers imagined, and pass those on to each other by abstract language. But especially for something like a
hive-mind or collective that can pass full details along, they can get away with a simple learning approach of “Don’t do what X did”. To continue the argument, the novel suggests that non-sentient beings or entities, like the aliens we encounter in the book, called the Scramblers, can process information and make decisions more efficiently than conscious beings. Without the distractions of self-awareness, internal dialogue, and the complexities of emotions, these beings can react to their environment and make optimizations purely based on survival and functionality. The Scramblers, who embody this principle, demonstrate remarkable intelligence and problem-solving abilities without any indication of self-awareness or consciousness.
It further argues the evolutionary cost, that consciousness is an expensive trait in terms of evolutionary resources. It requires complex neural structures, significant energy consumption, and can lead to decision-making that prioritizes the individual's immediate well-being or desires over long-term survival. In contrast, entities that operate on instinct or pre-programmed responses can allocate more resources towards reproduction, adaptation, and survival in hostile environments. And again this all very believable in a modern context with the rise of AI like ChatGPT, but the book takes it a bit further, and explores the idea that consciousness can lead to misinterpretation and misunderstanding, both within a species and in attempts to communicate with other life forms. The complexity of conscious thought and language can introduce ambiguity and error, whereas communication between non-conscious entities might be more direct, efficient, and less prone to misinterpretation. This will come back up in a moment when I say what the second half of Watts’ Fermi Paradox Solution is. Now a lot of folks point to the novel including
vampires in it as a bit of weird thing, and it kind of is, the captain of the exploratory ship is one for instance, kind of, but that’s the semi-appropriate nickname for an extinct species of humanity that they’ve found in the novel setting and cloned up from recovered DNA who have a lot of strange mental traits. I view them as a vehicle for both exploring some neurologically atypical thinking and pointing out that a dominant species is often going to diverge into having a sub-species or clade that develops to prey upon others. As a simple example, imagine a single species of bacteria, or nanobot gray goo, taking over a planet. That now means all competition for resources is with each other, so if you can kill a competitor and eat it, you’ve now got two birds with one stone, and that’s how predator cycles and divergence can occur even with something like AI down the road. But another part of it is the p-zombie notion since a cannibal is typically going to be effectively a sociopath or psychopath, probably not play well with others, even fellow cannibals, and to succeed might need to get very good at mimicking decent human behavior. We’re given many other examples of the civilization existing in the novel using genetic, neurological, and cybernetic engineering to create very odd humans who are also incredibly useful to their civilization, or dangerous, or both. And we can argue that we tend to encourage non-survival traits like
self-sacrifice or workaholic behavior ourselves. This leads some to make the case that society currently breeds for sociopaths which you can argue becomes a Fermi Paradox solution, and parallels our discussion earlier this year in our looks at the Hermit Shoplifter Hypothesis, the Cronus scenarios, and Interdiction Hypothesis. Watts advances the idea that the universe might indeed be teeming with life, but that life may predominantly be non-conscious, operating in ways that are efficient and effective yet entirely alien to our understanding. Conscious life, especially technologically advanced and communicative life like humans, might be exceptionally rare or even self-limiting on a cosmic scale. That the universe might favor entities that are not burdened by the complexities of self-awareness, positing consciousness not as an evolutionary goal but as a peculiar deviation that might ultimately limit the potential of life forms possessing it. Now for the book, Watts posits that the aliens
have come to Earth because we’re filling space with lots of garbage communication or scrap code and they’re reacting automatically to this to silence that source of weird and damaged data. It’s not a conscious decision by the aliens, it’s just an immune system like response. It’s left mysterious in the end, always a good idea for concluding a suspenseful and thought-provoking work, but the basic idea is that consciousness doesn't evolve much, and when it does, it tends to self-destruct, either by a normal evolutionary path, or by developing technologies that let them engineer life and different types of minds. Particularly
non-evolutionarily normal psychologies or intentionally making safe AI or slave races by giving them lots of brain but not much consciousness. When this fails to take them out, then the various very smart but non-conscious lifeforms in the galaxy come by and wipe them out because they interfere with good communication. I find the last a stretch but the idea of us engineering very smart but non-conscious minds definitely is not, that’s essentially our main modern aim with artificial intelligence. Keep it simple, keep it dumb, the minimum brains for the task, and where you can’t, keep it non-conscious or non-dangerous in possible mentalities.
I do not find the idea that non-conscious minds could win an interstellar war very compelling though, because in the absence of FTL, Faster Than Light travel or Communication, speed of thought and reaction becomes less decisive. I also don’t see any evolutionary path to interstellar travel at anything better than interstellar comet seeding speeds without technology, and evolving spaceship drives just seems implausible. Some machines with blueprints for spaceship drives that they can replicate ad nauseam once their human, or alien, creators are extinct, does seem decently plausible though. So too, naturally occurring dyson swarms or Kardashev 2 ecologies strikes me as a very plausible scenario if life can get going in space environments, and artificially created void ecologies is something we’ve discussed before too. This is why I sometimes reason that if alien intelligences are modestly common but either self-destruct or abandon galactic expansion, we might find space littered with some quasi-biological and alien examples of systems where von Neumann probes or gray goo ran amok and then diverged into an ecology afterwards. If we start reaching other solar systems and finding we constantly have to plow through a host of techno-organic hive minds nesting inside various asteroids, moons, and comets, we might determine that this was the Fermi paradox solution in play too. The reasons I don’t find this compelling though is
that I can’t see conscious minds voluntarily and universally surrendering consciousness, and I can't see any overwhelming compulsion for non-conscious entities to try to wipe out conscious ones or being terribly effective at it, beyond normal scenarios like gray goo. The weakness of the scripted response is that you can potentially be fooled by the same trick over and over, the weakness of the conscious mind is that it is slow, but if it has time it can develop tricks. We’ll discuss this scenario and the Medea hypothesis, or a gray goo version of it, in a moment, but let’s discuss Idiocracy options first.
As we discussed in our Devolution episode, there’s a general concern that a side effect of technology is that selection pressures which might have favored good physical health or intelligence might go away in a highly automated and paradise-like society. High-tech civilizations able to bring about paradises are also ones with vast access to resources and technology and are not going to have a problem like that sneak up on them and have a host of tools available to prevent or reverse it, so it only works if we assume they don’t care or actively want to be dumber, and as we noted in that episode, the idea that ignorance is bliss is at odds with science, which finds smarter folks generally report being happier. The other notion is that we don’t have to wait for a distant paradise future and that our own current society has lower birth rates for smart people. Idiocracy is a funny film though its scientific accuracy and plausibility are not very high and again we discussed it more in the aforementioned episode. There’s no reason to think we’re breeding for dumber people currently, even ignoring the Flynn Effect, and I’ve lost track of the number of highly intelligent and successful people I know who have full-blooded siblings who would fit the criteria for brains or behavior mocked in the film. Nature versus nurture is an ongoing debate when it comes to intelligence and other mental traits but the biggest factor in a lot of people having lots of kids or not was mostly luck influenced by how well they restrained their youthful hormones.
And an awful lot of what folks tend to view as success in life requires following a very simple formula, spend less money than you bring in and stick the extra funds in something that earns compound interest. The earlier and more rigorously you do that, the better the effect, and obviously having kids at a young age interferes with that. There’s a million other factors that can help or hinder that of course, but they key notion is that if two twins both head off to college, and one ends up with a kid in their freshmen year and drops out to take care of them, or one develops too great a fondness for partying and alcohol, they will still be passing the same genetics on to their kids. On the flip side, there is a worry that a lot of predatory narcissist types are pretty good at mimicking the characteristics people seek in mate selection, especially in what younger folks tend to be able to assess, and that they’re prone to short-term mating strategies. So if that trait is genetic, and there’s a decent amount of literature supporting it is at least partially hereditary, then a civilization might tend to see that trait become more common. That’s some parallel reasoning to what we were discussing with the Vampires from
Blindsight, that antisocial traits wouldn’t generally be favored in mate selection but if they’re paired up with a good ability to mimic or fit in, then they might suddenly become very likely to be passed on to future generations. Same as before, I think it’s a stretch for the Fermi Paradox as a strong late filter, especially as psychology and neurology ought vary wildly among aliens, but the case for it being a decent middle or late filter is better. Not so much that intelligence fizzles out by paradise bringing an absence of selection, but civilization breeding itself to be better at fighting and preying on its only real competition, each other.
Again, this seems to be conditional on the idea that we voluntarily let it happen though, given that we are aware of it and we have improving technology for detecting and addressing mental health issues. We should never assume trends in genetics or culture inevitably plow on, especially when we’re aware of them, at least if you have the conscious ability to contemplate how they’re bad and what actions you might take to handle it. You determine this is a way you could crash the metaphorical airplane, and now you can avoid the hazard.
So again, not really feeling the inevitable time bomb applies here. Now, the same applies to the Medea Hypothesis, that we looked at in our Gaia Hypothesis episode. The gaia hypothesis is the general idea that life moves toward every greater intelligence, particularly toward unified world minds, while the Medea Hypothesis argues that most life is very simple and unicellular and that complex life isn’t the fate of evolution, but rather a temporary condition it eventually wipes out, and our notion that conscious thought might be a temporary aberration runs along a similar line. Again, with a greater understanding of biology and science in general, our susceptibility to any naturally derived plague or other catastrophe goes down, as does our ability to detect that in advance. It seems ever more unlikely we would be caught unaware by some effect that was caused by anything that was itself unaware. Non-conscious minds or cycles shouldn't be good at outwitting conscious minds, when they have time to think, and even more than interstellar travel, evolution is something where time is not in short supply.
Now the exception to that is gray goo or semi-intelligent machine minds, call it the Grey Medea Hypothesis, as something like our own medical nanobots could act like any bacteria, but can and probably would be designed for rapidly strategizing and communicating with their neighbors to combat ailments and diseases, thus they could potentially get all those complex behavior scripts that we normally would only associate to higher intelligence but not actually need them. This is even more true given that we would like to build them to be very good at that so as to avoid the need for an AGI rival, under the “keep it simple, keep it dumb, or else you’ll end up under Skynet’s Thumb” rule. So they don’t have to evolve the ability to rapidly communicate and share strategy with each other, we’ll work our butts off to give it to them and make it the best we can. And if that turned sour, then you get the usual gray goo scenario, only a lot nastier and harder to resist, and not some puddle of goo emerging from a lab but rather 10 billion puddles exploding out from every human who had them.
Not a great situation for resistance either given that the folks least likely to have had nanobots would be the ones least likely to have advanced technical knowledge of them. The good news is that, as before, while this scenario might be new to us now, we don't have such nanobots yet, and it would seem inevitable to think it up and contemplate how to deal with it. In the end, while intelligence and consciousness may be our undoing, I don’t think it’s intrinsic, that it’s the time bomb that explodes eventually and inevitably to destroy us. Rather,
I think it’s the ability that will save us and let us explode out onto the galaxy one day. Ever since last year’s 3-hour long Fermi Paradox Compendium, I’ve found myself revisiting a lot of our Fermi Paradox topics with a fresh eye, and today is just one of several this year, out already or planned, and that started with a look at the Hermit Shoplifter Hypothesis which we released exclusively on Nebula back in December. One of the common threads since then has been the idea that worlds you settle far from Earth might be hard to control and a threat to you, making civilizations more hesitant to settle the galaxy, and a lot of that notion derives from how good those pioneers need to be at self-reliance and independence from the day they set sail from Earth. To make any attempt to settle a new world relies on being able to extract and use resources locally, what we call In-Situ Resource Utilization, or ISRU, and it is beyond difficult, but it should be possible and will be vital to even setting up a base on our proverbial doorstep, the Moon. In this month’s Nebula Exclusive
we will look at ISRU concepts and emerging technology, challenges, and suggested solutions. In-Situ Resource Utilization is out now exclusively on Nebula, our streaming service with a newly designed category-based interface, where you can also see every regular episode of SFIA a few days early and ad free, as well as our other bonus content, including extended editions of many episodes, and more Nebula Exclusives like last month’s episode Machine Monitors, April’s Galactic Beacons, Crystal Aliens from March, February’s Topopolis: The Eternal River, January’s Giant Space Monsters, December’s episode The Fermi Paradox: Hermit Shoplifter Hypothesis, Ultra-Relativistic Spaceships, Dark Stars at the Beginning of Time, Life As An Asteroid Miner, Nomadic Miners on the Moon, Retrocausality, and more. Nebula has tons of great content from an ever-growing community of creators. Using my link and discount it’s available now for just over $2.50 a month, less than the price of the drink or snack you might have been enjoying during the episode. Or even sign up for a lifetime membership, to see all the amazing content yet to come from myself and other creators on Nebula. When you sign up at my link,
https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur and use my code, isaacarthur, you not only get access to all of the great stuff Nebula offers, like In-Situ Resource Utilization, you’ll also be directly supporting this show. Again, to see SFIA early, ad free, and with all the exclusive bonus content, go to https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur Next week we’ll be looking at the idea of habitable moons with a discussion of Moons with liquid water on their surface that are heated by both sunlight and tidal heating, and how that could affect life developing there or adapting to such an Oceanic Moon. Then Sunday, June 16th, we’ll be looking at another place to live, and a very nice one at that, as we examine the idea of Paradise Planets, places even better than earth for us to live.
Then we’ll ask what would have happened if dinosaurs had never died off, on June 20th, and if we may have seen a world with a mix of big mammals and dinos, or even if they might have developed a civilization one day. After that we’ll explore the idea of hollow planets, both notions that Earth might be one, and that maybe it will become one in the future. If you’d like to get alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to hit the like, subscribe, and notification buttons. You can also help support the show by becoming a member here on Youtube or Patreon, or checkout other ways to help at IsaacArthur.net. As always, thanks for watching, and have a Great Week!
2024-06-14