The Fermi paradox asks why we haven’t found aliens yet. Scientists say the answer may lie in timing, technology, and the vast ...

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 ...

The best way to find alien technosignatures is to look for ones that have long survived their creators, according to a new ...

Is anybody out there? Probably. Most stars have planets; we've discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets thus far, and the most basic statistics point toward the existence of countless potentially ...

“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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The curious minds at What If explore what would happen if there were an alien civilization on Proxima b.

When I look at the night sky, I don’t wonder whether alien life is somewhere out there; I think it probably is. Considering the sheer number of stars in the cosmos, and the possibly larger number of ...