Avi Loeb doesn’t need to be a muckraker. As the head of the astronomy department at Harvard University, he sits in one of the most comfortable positions in academia. Nevertheless,…

“How many kingdoms know us not!”—Blaise Pascal, Thoughts (1670) One summer’s day in 1950, the great Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi was having lunch with the physicists…

After midnight in a sweltering room in Pasadena in July 1976, Viking Mars team members sat hunched around a bulky monotone computer monitor, tensely awaiting the first data from the…

Valencia, Spain, Oct. 6, 2006. After four long days, the 57th International Astronautical Congress draws to a close, and two prominent members of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence…

Last January I was walking with my granddaughter along a beach near Melbourne when we noticed several people gathered around a rock pool, peering into the water. Wondering what had…

If one is looking for signals from an extraterrestrial civilization, why not practice on some of the non-human communication systems already known on our own planet? Whales have had…

On the day that I was born—winter solstice, 1959—a headline in Life magazine proclaimed “Target Venus: There May be Life There!” It told of how scientists rode a balloon to…

Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was being uncharacteristically unambitious. He once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology is going to be indistinguishable from magic. If you…

This September, a team of astronomers noticed that the light from a distant star is flickering in a highly irregular pattern.1 They considered the possibility that comets, debris,…

A rocket powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen and carrying a scientific observatory blasted off into space at 10:49 p.m., March 6, 2009 (by local calendars and clocks). The launch…