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 ...

Advanced alien civilizations may communicate via a series of flashing lights, similar to how fireflies do, a new paper hints. This would potentially make extraterrestrials much harder to spot if we ...

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 ...

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 idea that our first confirmed alien signal might be a civilization’s final broadcast is rooted less in pessimism than in probability. If technological societies are fragile, then the cosmos could ...