Imagine a super-advanced alien civilization that needs insane amounts of energy way beyond our puny solar panels and wind turbines to power their mega-cities, AI overlords, or whatever interstellar ...

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, yet a growing group of researchers warns that such a moment might arrive not ...

A nihilistic alien civilization sounds like one that would simply lose hope, abandon progress, and fade away. But this ...

For decades, SETI researchers have focused on finding narrow-band radio signals that might stand out from the natural universe. But what if an advanced civilization that wanted to communicate would ...

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 ...

Black holes appear built to hide energy, not advertise it. Yet a civilization wrapping one in vast collectors could create a detectable glow, turning one of the universe’s darkest objects into a ...

If humanity ever makes contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization, we will have no shortage of questions.

Elon Musk’s plans for the future of SpaceX, and humanity, are rooted in an idea conceived in the 1960s when astronomers began to pick up mysterious, unknown radio sources in the cosmos. Soviet ...

For as long as we’ve been exploring space, the search for alien intelligence has followed a familiar script. We point antennas at the sky. We listen for radio signals. We scan for massive structures ...

Humanity has spent eons looking up at the stars and wondering whether we’re alone, or if there are others like us out there in the vast unknown. Our curiosity has only increased as we have become a ...