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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A new paper posits that advanced alien civilizations may communicate through subtle flashes, like fireflies do on Earth. The thought experiment suggests that we need to avoid human biases in our ...

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has yet to detect alien technosignatures like radio waves, but the cosmos is vast, and there are plenty of places left to look. New research ...

Assuming our solar system’s newest interstellar object isn’t an alien mothership sent here to menace us, humankind still hasn’t spotted any signs of extraterrestrial life, let alone intelligence — ...