A new paper posits that advanced alien civilizations may communicate through subtle flashes, like fireflies do on Earth. The ...

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 ...

THE KARDASHEV SCALE. We have no idea what an alien civilization would look like. Humans are evolved primates. What if an alien species is reptilian? Or more like an insect? Or a hybrid of these? Or ...

For decades, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been defined more by silence than discovery, but that balance may be starting to shift. As new telescopes, algorithms, and theoretical ...

After searching 100,000 galaxies for signs of highly advanced extraterrestrial life, a team of scientists using observations from NASA's WISE orbiting observatory has found no evidence of advanced ...

A cosmologist suggests we should look for exploration, along with energy signatures, to try and find aliens. Dyson spheres of some kind may be built to harvest energy from dark matter in black holes.

Complex, intelligent life in the galaxy appears vanishingly rare, with the nearest possible civilization perhaps 33,000 light-years distant. Yet despite the odds, scientists insist that continuing the ...

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 ...