Alien life
Pangalactic intelligence: Here’s a guess about how many aliens in the universe
[I]n excess of four billion years ago, practically as soon as our planet had sufficiently cooled from its fiery formation, ...
Why haven’t we been contacted by alien civilizations? Maybe because most have extinguished themselves, as we likely will
For some reason, civilization is not a self-perpetuating state of affairs on this planet. And perhaps not on other planets, ...
Extraterrestrial neighbors? Our galaxy contains over 30 intelligent civilizations, new calculations suggest
In 1961 the astronomer Frank Drake proposed what became known as the Drake equation, setting out seven factors that would ...
Dead or alive? The cosmology of viruses
Viruses are an inescapable part of life, especially in a global viral pandemic. Yet ask a roomful of scientists if ...
A different approach to finding alien life: What if ET breathes hydrogen instead of oxygen?
The first time we find evidence of life on a planet orbiting another star (an exoplanet), it is probably going ...
Chance of extraterrestrial contact will multiply by 1,000 in coming decade, says SETI scientist
[H]owever small the probability of seeing a signal from E.T. is, those chances are soon going to be a lot ...
Extraterrestrial protein found inside meteorite? If true, discovery bolsters pursuit of alien life
A team of researchers claim to have found a protein inside a meteorite. It would be the first protein ever ...
Visit Mars and bring back alien life? Troubles containing coronavirus should make us wary of bringing microbes to Earth
You know what? Maybe we ought to reconsider this whole thing about looking for life on other worlds. It would ...
We have 4 ways to search for alien life. Where should we focus our resources?
There are, right now, four ways to search for alien life, ranging from the most passive to the most active ...
‘Politics and war’: Why life on other planets would look a lot like our own
If other beings do populate the universe, what are they doing out there? Are the possible inhabitants of Teegarden b, ...
We may be getting closer to finding alien life, but don’t expect it to happen next year, expert say
Space.com asked top SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) experts about what next year may signal regarding detecting other starfolk. ...
If we find alien life, how will we protect it from our own ‘microbial stowaways’?
When we venture beyond the moon, we’ll be bringing trillions of microbial stowaways with us. Which complicates things. If we ...
Why this NASA engineer believes we’ve already found evidence of life on Mars
I was fortunate to have participated in that historic adventure as experimenter of the Labeled Release (LR) life detection experiment ...
Why we should search for alien life within our own Solar System
By examining interstellar asteroids and comets up close, argues Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, we might be able to tell whether ...
Searching for alien life: Why we shouldn’t ignore low-oxygen ‘dead planets’
Until recently, little was known about oxygen’s abundance in the atmosphere [when] microbes were the only life on the planet ...