Complex, intelligent life in the galaxy appears vanishingly rare, with the nearest possible civilization perhaps 33,000 light-years distant. Yet despite the odds, scientists insist that continuing the ...

Scientists searching for advanced alien civilizations have detected a mysterious signal in data from the world's largest ...

Sciencephile the AI applies the friendship paradox to argue our first contact is more likely with digital or machine ...

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 ...

What if aliens were building a massive power plant?Last time, I talked about the "Kardashev scale," which classifies the ...

Suppose an alien civilization discovers Earth and decides to investigate. Before it chooses a landing site or considers how to introduce itself, it faces a less dramatic question: how much mass should ...

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 ...

Finding a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization takes more than just pointing a telescope in the right direction. We ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...