Imagine receiving a message from another world. Not from a distant galaxy millions of light years away, but from a planet ...

Looking ahead: Existing radio surveys may contain signals that were never recognized as potential technosignatures. New ...

Attention human. You are receiving an interstellar radio transmission. And it could be coming from one of the nearest exoplanets, Proxima Centauri b. What conditions make this planet a candidate for ...

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 ...

When ET phones home, it could be his last call. Contrary to sci-fi movie depictions, our first contact might not be with a super advanced alien civilization at the height of power. Rather, Ivy League ...

For decades, humans have scanned for signals of alien technology emanating through the galaxy. The search highlights the contradiction between the abundance of planets and stars that stretch across ...

“There is a silence in the night sky that has bothered me for as long as I can remember.” That line, attributed to Richard Feynman, lands because it gets at a simple, stubborn feeling. The sky looks ...

Hollywood makes initiating alien contact seem much easier than it has proven to be. In E.T. the Extraterrestrial, E.T. got ...

A Soviet astronomer in the 1960s proposed a scale to classify hypothetical alien civilizations. Here’s why the framework is still coming up today.