One evening last year, when his newborn daughter was small enough to hold with one arm, René Heller reached for a book to occupy his mind while he rocked her to sleep. Heller, an astrophysicist at the ...

What if aliens in the universe send a message to Earth, and we can’t understand what they’re saying? Communicating with another species is likely to be tricky, given how difficult it already is for ...

The decision to actively send messages to aliens is controversial. There are two main avenues of thinking—the first, known as SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is that we should actively ...

Is there anybody out there? More than four decades ago, in 1974, astronomers beamed a message from humanity to any aliens in outer space who might be listening. Even in a best-case scenario, it hasn’t ...