If so, why haven’t they said hello? The humble residents of this pale blue dot have been on a quest to find an alien civilisation for more than a century. First, it was the “canals” of Mars. Then ...

In 1967, astronomers thought they had finally heard from the neighbors. They intercepted a signal so regular and precise it seemed impossible for it to be natural. But the excitement didn’t last.

In his classic science fiction novel Contact, Carl Sagan remarked, “The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.” Physicist Enrico Fermi is credited with ...

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 ...

Where are all the aliens? No, I don’t mean microbes on Mars or creatures swimming beneath the ice crusts of Europa or Enceladus, but honest-to-God intelligent aliens, capable of space travel? Corbet’s ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...