The first unmistakable signal from another intelligence may not be a cheerful greeting. A growing group of researchers is arguing that our inaugural contact is more likely to be a distress call, 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 ...

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.

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 ...

The Milky Way as a laboratory for civilizations Any attempt to chart alien societies has to start with the structure of The Milky Way itself, a disk roughly 100,000 light years across with hundreds of ...