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 ...

Seven Rasmussen, an astrobiologist and author of the new book Cloudy with a Chance of Starships, gives readers a tour of the ...

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, 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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...