This video is sponsored by CuriosityStream. Get access to my streaming video service, Nebula, when you sign up for CuriosityStream using the link in the description. Sometimes the future’s not so bright ... so you have to make your own light. So often on this show we look at vast interstellar empires or massive megastructures, civilizations so enormous that they could fill entire planets just with everyone born in a given minute of a given day.
So I thought today we would look at a smaller civilization, those who occupied not planets around distant stars but the vast gulfs of space between those stars. It’s strange to think that our planet occupies only a very tiny portion of our solar system, getting less than a billionth of our Sun’s light, and yet that vast pocket of space warmed by our Sun to the point it is livable represents less than a quadrillionth of the volume of space nominally influenced by our sun, rather than one of the neighboring stars. As we go out to colonize the outer solar system, where the Sun is still quite bright compared to any other star in the sky, and into the galaxy to make homes around those stars, and we consider colonizing those other distant galaxies, it is so easy to forget that each of those is but a tiny island in a vast nothingness of empty space. And yet it is not actually empty, even if it is far more barren than any desert or tundra. Today we will contemplate civilizations that might choose to dwell in the depths of interstellar or even intergalactic space, or those who might be forced to do so. We estimate that there are roughly a billion-trillion stars in the Observable Universe, which itself is almost a hundred billion light years in diameter, meaning there’s only a few stars per trillion cubic light years, and that if stars were evenly distributed Universe-wide, you’d typically have thousands of light years between each star.
Inside our galaxy things are far denser, with even the more sparse parts of it requiring only tens or perhaps a hundred light years between stars, while in areas of the galaxy like our own, a volume of space a thousand light years across would contain in the vicinity of a million stars, and some clusters of space, or the bulge at the galactic center, are even denser. And yet even at the center the vast majority of space is too dimly lit for a planet to be livable. Here in our solar system, where the Earth is habitable just 1 astronomical unit, or AU, from our Sun, for us to find a place where our Sun was no longer the brightest star would require traveling at least a hundred thousand times farther from our Sun, till one of our brighter neighbors like Sirius finally outmatched our Sun’s light. Indeed, you would have to travel over 600 AU from the Sun simply to reach the point where our Sun shone only as brightly as our Full Moon does.
At this radius, over 15 times the distance to Pluto at its farthest from the Sun and out beyond even the Kuiper Belt, an object would still orbit our Sun, but would do so every 15,000 years, and yet it is still close enough that it could send a message back to Earth and get a reply in around a week, while a message to a neighboring star would take a decade to get a reply back if not longer. It would be hard, but not impossible, to run on solar power way out here, where a mirror would need to be a kilometer across to focus in enough light to run your typical household let alone heat it. Again, hard but not impossible, and indeed the ambient star light in this region of the galaxy is around a microwatt per square meter, so a square kilometer of mirrors and solar panels starlight would contribute a single watt of power - more in denser regions of the galaxy and less in the halo of the outer galaxy. Such tiny trickles of power might be used to run a civilization, and we will return to considering that option later, but we need not limit ourselves to considering a solar economy.
Indeed it's quite possible those would be denied folks living that far away from a star as every star in their area might be a Dyson Swarm already, its light guzzled up by a trillion solar collectors and habitats orbiting that star to form an opaque haze. However, our larger power plants produce around a gigawatt, and those billion watts of power can run a modest sized community, including artificial lighting where there is no sun, such as in deep space or inside a rotating habitat. This would be true even if they are no more efficient with its use than we are nowadays, and far more so for hypothetical civilizations that might thrive on ultra-cold and ultra-efficient computing that we’ll discuss later today.
To power this community for 24 hours might require burning 2 million kilograms of gasoline, a single kilogram of uranium fuel rods, 100 grams of deuterium/tritium fusion fuel, or just a couple grams of any old matter if thrown into a black hole. The latter could even be hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, or potentially dark matter. And a Gigawatt is about how much sunlight is on a square kilometer of land at noon, so something like a large ONeill Cylinder, which might have around a thousand times that internal land area and power needs, might need around 100 kilograms of fusion fuel per day, ideally hydrogen though right now it's rarer deuterium or tritium isotopes are better candidates for fusion . How hard is it to come up with a hundred kilograms
of hydrogen a day? Well a single oil tanker might carry a million times that, enough for a few thousand years of operation, and as mentioned, this is the sort of power scale needed to light something like an O’Neill Cylinder, which might comfortably house tens or hundreds of thousands of people, or even more. If your community can’t find a way to get a single oil tanker sized ship full of the most plentiful substance in the Universe every few thousand years, it probably has bigger problems. In context, a civilization limited to simple fusion who decided to build an O'Neill Cylinder might keep 100,000 people living on a terawatt of power inside a Cylinder that massed only a trillion kilograms, a fairly skinny cylinder built on sparse amounts of material.
If they had also bought an equal mass of fusion fuel when sourcing the construction material, they should have tens of millions of years’ worth of fuel. Such an island in the void is no bigger in area or population than your average US county, and there are thousands of counties, all of which make up only about a percent of this planet, our pale blue dot that would be less than a mote of dust in the eyes of a true Kardashev-2 Civilization encompassing a star, which might feature quadrillions of cylinder habitats, and yet such habitats are hardly an insignificant thing except in relative size. We will continue by contemplating a handful of scenarios for folks living out in such voids, from the human to the posthuman, from those living on the fringes of interstellar trade to those hiding in the icy cold from a hunting enemy or even sipping on dark matter or dark energy beyond the galaxy. I want to start by focusing on two more near term scenarios, ice miners in the Oort Cloud and those helping gather fuel and raw materials in true interstellar space either to run their own habitat or help fuel a laser pushing array. Now we can keep it fairly brief on our ice miners, here you are collecting large amounts of ice, potential comets and the like, and sending them sunward. They are their own fuel supply and may be fairly rich in heavier elements too.
An icy body in the outer solar system or even in deep space is mostly a mix of rocky dust and frozen water, methane, carbon dioxide, and ammonia, so there is no shortage of fusion fuel or life-relevant elements. It is hardly a gold mine of raw materials but is likely to provide enough of them for building a habitat and for trade for items more easily obtained in the inner system. Now, we often contemplate shoving a comet into the inner solar system for use in terraforming a planet but in practice you might be more likely to harvest it out there and send in just the parts you need as you need them. Access to working fusion reactors would help with such efforts, but is not necessary, especially in the Kuiper Belt and Scattered Disc it should be no problem to beam power out to anyone doing the mining, but fusion would make it easier. It also makes it more likely to make such operations permanent manned facilities rather than automated processes. You get some chunk of rock and ice a kilometer across out there, then you’ve got yourself around a trillion kilograms of material, and that’s enough to build and fuel a respectable habitat for a long time.
As to what you are paying for other supplies with, those things you are buying are likely to be almost all raw materials or equipment for initial creation of your facilities and habitat, or subsequent growth of those, for things you can’t source locally. If your stake out in the Oort Cloud is some comet with an estimated million tons of iron in it and only a hundred thousand tons of aluminum, you are probably building your habitat out of steel not aluminum, but that won’t build you a lot of habitat either. Very loosely speaking, assume you need around a ton of construction material for every square meter of living area inside a rotating habitat, or a megaton per square kilometer, and that will only build a thin floor. In a case like that you might be placing a bigger effort on using carbon allotropes like nanotubes or graphene or artificial diamond for your main construction material. You might only be buying information and data from in-system, you might be buying energy beamed in, but at the end of the day you have no commodities to sell that are rare so you are likely to be marginal operations where self-sufficiency is most important.
Of course it's folks who are prone to self-sufficiency who are most likely to be considering colonizing some icy body a billion kilometers from even the nearest tiny habitat. How you operate out there depends a lot on whether you live out there because you like living in the futuristic version of the log cabin up on the forested mountain that you roll your pickup down once a season to hit the general store or if you are hiding in the hinterlands to avoid the law, taxes, or self-replicating kill swarms seeking out signs of civilization to wipe them out. Neither one is really a trade focused approach but we do have another approach that’s trade focused and we will use that to segue away from ice mining into gas and dust harvesting. We have often discussed on the show the possibility of moving your ships between solar systems, or even inside solar systems, by using giant pushing lasers rather than internal rockets, ships riding rivers of light between the stars.
It is possible to focus a laser over huge distances, potentially light years, but we tend to assume if possible you would have a lot of relays and boosting stations along the way. These might be supplied with power from those lasers, simply refocusing light at a slight loss and using some of the power for themselves to run operations, and they might also get materials and supplies from the ships passing by who they send beams to push on, but they are likely to be better off sourcing material locally too and while they might be able to find large bodies nearby, be it a hunk of ice or a full blown rogue planet or brown dwarf, they might be forced to instead harvest the Interstellar Medium or ISM. The Interstellar Medium is the gas and dust floating between the stars and is divided into 6 major categories, Molecular Clouds, Cold Neutral Medium, or CNM, Warm Neutral Medium, or WNM, Warm Ionized Medium, or WIM, H-II Regions, and the Hot Ionized Medium, or HIM, often called Coronal Gas.
Molecular Clouds are only a tiny fraction of the ISM, they are cold and dense so that the matter in them is in molecular form, not lone atoms and ionized particles, and they can average hundreds of particles per cubic centimeter all the way up to a million, while alternatively Coronal Gas is the hottest ISM and least dense, anywhere from hundreds to thousands of cubic centimeters per particle. A Molecular Cloud is often where star formation is happening and those are stellar nurseries but not all molecular clouds are forming stars and this type of ISM is least common but most rich for mining. Two notes on that, first it is still very minimal, a million particles per cubic centimeter is still millions of times thinner than the air you are breathing. Second, while it is estimated to make up less than 1% of the interstellar medium by volume, keep in mind that habitable zones of solar systems, even being very generous in how wide that is, make up around a quadrillionth of the Interstellar medium, so there are a trillion times more Molecular Cloud by volume than habitable zones.
On the flip side Coronal Gas or Hot Ionized Matter makes up somewhere between one and two thirds of the ISM, it’s a little hard to estimate, and this is actually referring to the Galactic Corona, or Galactic Halo, the very thin and hot gases that tend to be on the outskirts of spiral galaxies. We are not sure what processes contribute to the HIM most, be it just solar wind of a trillion stars or supernovae or what have you, but lots of gas and dust gets pushed out away from the galaxy but not quite fast enough to escape it entirely and falls into thin, hot clouds around the galaxy. “Hot” can be a bit misleading in this context, we tend to think of hot as something that can burn you but even though we often have ISM temperatures hotter than any earthly oven, you’d still freeze to death in them just because they are so thin that almost no collisions are happening to transfer heat to you from them. In context it mostly means how fast the individual particles are moving, for instance a lone hydrogen atom, with a molecular weight of 1, and a temperature of 10 million kelvin, has a root mean square speed of 500 kilometers per second, around the escape velocity of our galaxy. Alternatively a water molecule, molecular weight of 18, at just 10 kelvin, in one of these colder molecular clouds, might only be moving at 120 meters per second, 4000 times slower, though still a hundred times faster than you or I can walk.
That matters a lot for replenishment, if for instance I am mining in a gas cloud and sweeping out everything for a million kilometers around, then one in a molecular cloud might have a billion times more mass in it than one in coronal gas, but the former would take around a year to replenish from drift from neighboring gas while the latter take more like an hour. Coronal Gas is also ionized so is a lot easier to potentially sweep up using electromagnetic fields. This is also true of H-II regions, such as the Orion Nebula, which are nebula in which star formation has recently occurred, and thus are pretty hot, around 8000 Kelvin, meaning they are ionized too, and can range in density a lot, but like Molecular clouds make up less than a percent of the galaxy. If we ignore these tiny regions and the large Coronal Gas regions of the Halo, that leaves us 3 main types, the Cold and Warm Neutral Medium, and the Warm Ionized Medium which is probably the largest type. The Cold Medium is only 1-5% percent of the galaxy, and is fairly dense, at 20-50 particles per cubic centimeter, but is made of neutral atomic hydrogen so isn’t too easy to collect.
There’s a lot more Warm Neutral Medium, 10-20% of the ISM, but it contains much less hydrogen, about 1% the density of the Cold Neutral Medium. The Warm Ionized Medium, which makes up between 20-50% of the ISM, is at the same density as the Warm Neutral Medium but the gas is ionized and thus can be pulled in, swept up with electric fields and so on. I’m not sure what the best way to do this would be, but at a temperature of 8000 Kelvin and a molecular weight of 1, those particles generally move 14 kilometers per second. So for a given square kilometer of gas collector, your collector might suck in around 10^-11 kilograms of mass per second or something around a gram a year, that’s very approximate.
But that would mean you needed something like 100 million of those collectors to fill your tanks for that 100 kilograms a day fusion reactor fuel we contemplated for running a large O’Neill Cylinder… alternatively some small virtual community of a few hundred digital folks might easily run on just one of those collectors. Now a hundred million kilometer-wide collectors might sound like a lot but that would be roughly planet-sized and honestly that’s about the volume of space the typical full-sized O’Neill Cylinder might claim as its own in a packed Dyson Swarm, which are only dense in relative terms. A random Cubic Light Year of space would contain around a billion-billion-billion such pockets.
You wouldn’t want a station in each one of them, that gas is not an infinite supply and its essentially like well water replenishing at a trickle from the volume around it, but you could easily have stations spaced every Astronomical Unit throughout interstellar space sucking in hundreds of times that much gas each and every day and still not risk depleting the gas supply even on astronomical timelines. They could be selling that gas on to bigger places serving as major laser highway relay points or running their own lesser ones. For that matter they might tend to form long tubes around the main transit lanes where they are sweeping up the gas and dust specifically to keep the laser highway lane clear, which would allow fastest and safest travel speeds, and keeping the material as a bonus for trade. This is potentially possible even in the intergalactic medium where the density is on an order of a million times less dense, a particle per cubic meter, or even in the sparser regions of the Cosmic Voids. Indeed if they run themselves on artificial black holes instead of fusion, they are pulling off nearly a hundred times better power generation per unit of matter. We might also hypothesize that they’ve gotten their hands on technology able to pull dark matter in and use it for power, see our Dark Matter Technologies episode for more discussion of that.
Dark Matter is even more abundant than hydrogen, and is evenly spread throughout the galaxy out to the Halo, so for folks hiding out in the Halo, either because they want to take advantage of ultra-cold computing or because they are actually hiding, dark matter might be a very tempting power supply. Dark Energy is also a plausible option, it seems to be evenly spread everywhere. I don’t know how you would tap it but if you could, you could set up shop anywhere in the Universe. Now sourcing your power needs is important but as we can see, not too tricky itself. Indeed the hard part will be hiding your heat emissions if you are out in the deep and trying not to be found, not with coming up with power, at least not unless the whole galactic civilizations is running low on power.
Coming up with raw materials shouldn’t be much harder than trading fusion fuel, if you’re sourcing either from in-system. Coming up with fuel or raw materials out in the void might not be too hard either though. Not much of the Interstellar medium is dust, it’s almost all hydrogen and helium, but it is in there, and for that matter if you run on fusion it is quite plausible you can turn lighter elements into heavier elements at a profit, maybe even very heavy elements like iron, but you can always use your power supply to make heavier elements at a loss too. The tricky part about fusion for us is doing it at a gain, but if you’ve got energy abundance you can mass-produce any element you want, though that could easily end up running you energy costs parallel or in excess to bringing the material in from interstellar distances at a fraction of light speed.
It would depend a lot on what your technology allowed. One example we see in fiction is from Orion’s Arm, where they have Deep Well Industrial Zones. These are usually assumed to be micro-black holes the mass of a large asteroid stuffed in orbit of a gas giant that uses that gas to stuff it down the black hole and use the accretion disc for nucleosynthesis and power generation.
It works just as well in deep space if you’re collecting the gas and bringing it in, but a micro-black hole in that size range makes a potentially potent way to turn hydrogen and helium into heavier and scarcer elements and do it a lot faster and better than a star does. Stars are not fast or efficient generators of heavy elements, they just do it naturally and thus for free from our current perspective. Now I mentioned that the preferred place for one of these is in orbit of a gas giant and it is important to remember that while the interstellar void has gas and dust, it does actually have objects too. Brown Dwarfs, which can be thought of as very large gas giants or very small failed stars, are very common in this galaxy, and we currently estimate there may be as many as a hundred billion of them. Indeed there’s a red dwarf brown dwarf binary, Scholz’s Star, about 22 light years from us that we believe passed through our Oort Cloud 70,000 years ago, disrupting it a bit. Incidentally while Alpha Centauri may be our nearest system currently at 4 light years away, we generally do pass near another star as close as a light year or less every million or so years.
Brown Dwarfs are not proper solar systems themselves, they produce no visible light to fuel photosynthesis, but they are rich territories for any exo-stellar civilization as they are likely to have their own collections of planets, moons, and asteroids. There are also a vast number of rogue planets out there, not orbiting any sun, likely far more than there are suns. You could find an Earth-mass planet out in the void, give it it’s own artificial micro Sun orbiting it like we discussed doing in Making Suns, and thaw the world out for terraforming, and its quite probably there are more planets in this mass range than stars though most would be covered in thick shell of water, ammonia, and methane ice you would need to remove first, or drill into and build under the ice. For every solar system out there, assume at least an order of magnitude more rogue objects big enough to at least qualify as a dwarf planet in the void, probably more, and each able to easily support billions if not trillions of people in the context of being turned into building material and fuel for rotating habitats. I just mentioned how we often have stars pass closer to us than Alpha Centauri is, and we expect to find many rogue planets out in our Oort Cloud or drifting between stars, ejected during planetary formation.
Estimates I’ve seen range from them being slightly more numerous than stars to thousands of times more numerous, and presumably depend a lot on what the cutoff would be in size, we will not rehash today what the definition of a planet should be, but a dwarf planet smaller than Pluto is still an incredible find able to support billions of people. As we explored in Colonizing the Oort Cloud or way back in our episode on Rogue Planets, these each have the potential to become individual civilizations that while far smaller than any Dyson Swarm that might form around a star, would still eclipse our own modern one. And if we switch to include the millions if not billions of kilometer-size objects floating around Interstellar space between any given pair of stars, each able to house a decent-sized city if not more, we start seeing that these exo-stellar civilizations wouldn’t be too small at all. But this all assumes we mean exo-stellar civilizations as those who live between the stars while far bigger civilizations live around those stars, like the rural hinterlands between the great dyson swarms. But as we were discussing in our recent episode Killing Stars, those biggest and brightest supergiants might make for the best power supplies, but they’re not efficient and don’t really benefit us as sources of power or raw materials except in the sense that a forest fire is a great way to keep warm and a great source of charcoal. You get that for free in the sense it costs you no labor or time, but to growing civilizations with access to artificial fusion or to micro black holes it isn’t a long term good approach.
Civilizations may be able to take stars apart via star lifting, or barring that, take action to prevent stars forming and suck up those materials for controlled use. In which case we begin seeing all those civilizations as exo-stellar, and now they simply clump as close as good resource utilization permits, since being closer always allows faster and cheaper movement of people, resources, and data. You could end up with a vast dark galaxy composed entirely of artificial structures, each sitting on hordes of resources to keep themselves running while slowly sipping away at the various gas and dust not yet collected.
These could be rotating habitats internally lit by artificial power populated with people and our pets, plants, and parasites, or it could be an ultra-dark and cold affair where everyone lives as digital beings inside virtual realms, a whole galaxy transmuted into a computer whose scope and processing power dwarfs the typical Kardashev-3 Civilizations the way those Dwarf Kardashev-2 civilizations and those dwarf our current one. It could be both simultaneously too, see our Black Hole Trilogy or Civilizations at the End of Time Series for more discussion of these approaches, or our episode Virtual Worlds and Life as a Digital Being for a deeper look at what those lives would be like. Before closing out, folks often ask me if our notion of detecting Dyson swarms or galactic empires by their star-encompassing infrared waste heat signatures would be invalidated by exo-stellar civilizations and the answer is no. The concept of the Dyson Dilemma isn’t about detecting individual Dyson swarms, it's about the notion that growing civilizations will put resources to use, and if bound by our Universe and its current known laws will need to deal with finite supplies of matter and energy and growing entropy. In this context it doesn’t matter if you are living around a star or living around a black hole you dump matter into, you can only pack folks in so tight before they’d overheat on their waste heat.
Same for if they all had individual fusion reactors of their own. They can only be so tight. They want to be tight because even a fully-packed Dyson Swarm is way less population-dense than a desert or tundra and distance just limits who you can interact with and how quickly and cheaply. So they pack into a loose sphere, but a sphere can only get rid of heat in proportion to their surface area which grows with the square of radius, whereas the volume inside grows with the cube, so if you keep the same density in a sphere and make it ten times wider, you now have a thousand times as many folks producing a thousand times as much heat, with only a hundred times the heat dissipation. So if you were already at your max, you would need your new density to be ten times lower to keep up the necessary heat dissipation.
This is why large gregarious civilizations would tend to look like Dyson Spheres, or rather that both look like big clumps of infrared illumination. If they are biologically based their surface temperature needs to be around what our planet is, whether they are a hoard of habitats, a few million in a swarm only a hundred kilometers across or some mega-dyson like the Birch Planet, a light year across, and will appear as infrared light of about 300 Kelvin or wavelength of about ten micrometers. If they’re post-biological, they probably go colder, maybe all the way down to 30 Kelvin or a peak waste heat wavelength of a single micrometer, but they can’t get down near the temperature of the CMB or Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, just under 3 Kelvin, so they still stick out like a big thumb, and a bigger thumb too since a civilization ten times cooler needs 10^4 or ten thousand times more surface area to radiate the same amount of power, making them 100 times wider. They do not have to cluster together and doubtless many would pack up their stuff and flee for deep space far from others, but you can’t hide these civilizations by being spread out, you can only hide them by throttling their power use way down, and even that isn’t a good means to hide, just a good way to run ultra-cold and efficient, and we explored that more in our episode Sleeping Giants. In all cases there will tend to be an ideal temperature they run at and that would correspond to a peak wavelength you would see, and we would pick it up out of the background radiation.
However, there are several other background radiation types with peaks not in the microwave range but we have more mundane explanations for them than alien civilizations. In any event, whether our future is around alien stars or in the cold depths of deep space, it has the option of being a very bright one, and exo-stellar civilizations might begin as the pioneers on the outskirts sipping at wisps of interstellar dust and icy rocks, but they may end as the great empires of the galaxy. So regular viewers might have noticed that today’s episode was a bit longer than we normally have been doing for our mid-month bonus episodes. I’d originally meant for those to be fairly short 10-15 minutes videos but as regular viewers probably have also noticed, brevity isn’t my strong suit.
There’s always stuff that gets left out of every episode, often in an attempt at brevity, in this case I’d like to talk a bit more about what extreme engineering we might see in a post-stellar galaxy would make things look like, one where they have the time and power to rearrange the whole thing. So today we'll have a Nebula Plus Extended edition of the episode to discuss that as an addendum and there’s a couple ways I try to handle that without doing addendum episodes which Youtube’s algorithms tend to be unkind to channels about. Sadly youtube also doesn’t let us replace episodes with corrected versions once they’re released, and they also got rid of annotations to videos, so I can't even put a note up saying “Oops, that was 100 square meters not 100 square feet or light years”, so I can’t really add addendums developed late in production in case an error slips through.
Indeed that inability to replace videos or add corrective annotations is a big reason why episodes tend to get written months in advance these days, to let us make very sure the content is right. For now, the working solution to that is going to be release addendum material. Sometimes we can do that as a new episode of its own - but today’s episode is already essentially part 4 of a discussion of settling space without a focus on yellow suns like our own, 4 episodes where I meant to have 1 - so our other options are for shorter addendums, doing either an insert into the mid-hour break of our monthly livestream Q&A or one of our new Nebula Plus Extended Features, as Youtube’s algorithm leaves livestreams be and I’m a confounder of Nebula and thus can replace videos with corrected versions. This extended version will be a bit long for a livestream break, like we did with our episode on Orbital Bombardments’ asteroid impact addendum in last month’s livestream.
So today we’re going to have an Extended episode looking at that post-stellar, compacted galaxy, over on Nebula. I often talk about how we built that platform to give creator’s more control over their work and we’ll be taking advantage of it to do that today. I have to say it’s been fun developing Nebula and watching it grow, and my thanks to everyone who signed up for that to help us grow it. I also want to thank Curiositystream, today’s sponsor, for their help with that too, they’ve been offering everyone a deal where they extend free Nebula Membership to folks who join Curiositystream using our link in episode descriptions, for as long as they stay a Curiositystream member, and it’s such an amazing fit for us because Curiousitystream’s educational content so matches our own. If you haven’t already seen their “A Curious World” Series, by the way, make sure to check it out, as its got some great episodes like “Can We Colonize Mars?” or looking at the “Nanomedicine Revolution”.
Curiosity Stream has thousands of fun and educational videos, and they have partnered up with us at Nebula, our Streamy-Award Nominated streaming service, to offer Nebula’s content along with their own, if you sign up at the link in the episode description. That means you will not only get Curiosity Stream, and at a 26% discount, but also lets you catch SFIA episodes a couple days early and without ads, and helps support our show while you’re doing it, not to mention getting to see our extended version of today’s episode. And you can get all that for less than $15 by using the link in the episode’s description. So that will wrap us up for another Scifi Sunday but stick around the channel afterwards and head on over to our community tab as we will be running a poll of 5 possible episode topics to select an episode we’ll do a few months from now. As I was mentioning a couple minutes ago, our episodes take a while to make which is why the topics we select now will come out early in the summer, and please head on over and vote for the one you would like to see. We also tend to source these topics from discussions over in our social media groups, facebook, patreon, reddit, and discord and I usually close episodes out after our schedule by reminding folks they’re welcome to join those for discussion and possible future episodes and polls on them is one of our more common topics.
Speaking of that schedule, next week we’ll be taking a look at how to restore life with technology, in our Episode “Resurrection” on March 18th, and two weeks from now we’ll ask the big question of what Sentience really is, then close the month out with our Monthly Livestream Q&A on Sunday, March 28th. If you want alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel, and if you’d like to help support future episodes, you can donate to us on Patreon, or our website, IsaacArthur.net, which are linked in the episode description below, along with all of our various social media forums where you can get updates and chat with others about the concepts in the episodes and many other futuristic ideas. You can also follow us itunes, Soundcloud, or Spotify to get our audio-only versions of the show.
Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!
2021-03-15