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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Sometimes it seems like we got to the galactic party late and everyone has already gone home. Our species only figured out how to ...

The Fermi Paradox ponders an endlessly fascinating question: If so many worlds exist in the universe, why haven’t we detected any sign of extraterrestrial life? A possible reason, called 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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Whether or not aliens exist, the SETI program has never stopped believing. Yet today, radio telescopes are no longer seen as the best way to ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I cover aerospace, astronomy & hosted The Cosmic Controversy Podcast. Nov 17, 2025, 05:21am EST Nov 28, 2025, 12:25am EST A team ...