Scientists have spent decades imagining how advanced alien civilizations might become—and where humanity fits on that scale.

Black holes can release enormous energy through hot disks, surrounding plasma and powerful jets, enough to support a civilization far beyond ours. Any giant collector would release unused energy as ...

Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence has so far primarily meant focusing on one particular type of signal—and that ...

A new study published as a preprint on arXiv suggests that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations might not need to surround ...

Looking ahead: Existing radio surveys may contain signals that were never recognized as potential technosignatures. New ...

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 ...

Hollywood makes initiating alien contact seem much easier than it has proven to be. In E.T. the Extraterrestrial, E.T. got stranded on earth when his alien compadres abandoned their botany mission. In ...

Researchers are zeroing in on more deliberate “narrow-band” alien signals, well outside the radio frequencies SETI has ...

The best way to find alien technosignatures is to look for ones that have long survived their creators, according to a new paper. Reading time 3 minutes In our search for life beyond Earth, we might ...

“There is a silence in the night sky that has bothered me for as long as I can remember.” That line, attributed to Richard Feynman, lands because it gets at a simple, stubborn feeling. The sky looks ...

A Soviet astronomer in the 1960s proposed a scale to classify hypothetical alien civilizations. Here’s why the framework is ...