The first unmistakable signal from another intelligence may not be a cheerful greeting. A growing group of researchers is ...

Could the first confirmed signal from an extraterrestrial source be less a hello than a goodbye? Astrophysicist David Kipping argues as much, and his “Eschatian Hypothesis” reimagines the way ...

The Fermi Paradox ponders an endlessly fascinating question: If so many worlds exist in the universe, why haven’t we detected any sign of extraterrestrial life? A possible reason, called the ...

If so, why haven’t they said hello? The humble residents of this pale blue dot have been on a quest to find an alien civilisation for more than a century. First, it was the “canals” of Mars. Then ...

For decades, science fiction writers have tried their best to prepare us for eventual contact with aliens. Their efforts are dominated by several recurrent tropes. There's the invasion by a warlike ...

In 1950, famed astrophysicist Enrico Fermi posed a profound question during a casual lunch with colleagues: Where is everybody? In other words, if there’s an extremely high probability that advanced ...

Sometimes it seems like we got to the galactic party late and everyone has already gone home. Our species only figured out how to get into orbit within the last century. Since then, we’ve flown ...

In 1995, a pair of scientists discovered a planet outside our solar system orbiting a solar-type star. Since that finding—which won the scientists a portion of the 2019 Nobel Prize in ...