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 first unmistakable signal from another intelligence would rank alongside fire and writing in the story of our species, ...

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 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 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 ...