Seth Shostak

As spring eases into summer, the multiplexes are witnessing an all-out alien assault. Within the space of a month, silver screens have shown ships of the U.S. Navy belching ordnance at invading extraterrestrials in Battleship; portrayed black-garbed government agents keeping tabs on ornery aliens in Men in Black III; and...

You may not see massive UFO exhibits at your local science museum, but there's no dearth of saucer stories infesting my email. Every day I receive several reports of alien sightings, extraterrestrial plans for Earth, and agitated screeds about the reluctance of scientists to take the whole subject seriously. Plenty...

Could there be a faster way to discover interesting galactic neighbors? Is there some scheme for detecting aliens that might work quicker than tuning in their radio transmissions or hunting down their laser pulses?

There might be, and for a simple reason. The cosmos is three times as old as...

Apocalypse is always fashionable news. After all, what could be a bigger story than the end of the Earth, or at least its veneer of troublesome, hominid fuzz?

The past 12 months have seen plenty of predictions on the imminent demise of either the planet or some substantial fraction of...

If robots have tear ducts, they'll be giving them a good workout this week. Dick Tufeld, the voice of one of television's most famous robots, has died at the age of 85.

In case you don't remember, the TV robot in question was the mildly helpful, low-grade artificial-intelligence-on-wheels in the...

They're gray, big-eyed, and smoother than a buffed Maserati. They're aliens à la Hollywood. Lacking noses, ears, hair, and a sense of humor, these short-statured creatures are omnipresent in sci-fi films and TV.

Not surprisingly, many members of the public assume that if we ever interact with real extraterrestrials, they'll...

There's a well-known historical event that astronomers routinely cite whenever they wish to prove their modesty: it's called the Copernican Revolution. It taught us to always assume that our circumstances are typical, rather than special -- that we're just another kid on the block, another bird in the flock. But...

It's hard to believe, but only a century ago the heroic age of exploration was easing to a close. At the bottom of the world, Robert Scott and his four companions were wearily sledging across 800 miles of ice, destined to find the tent of their triumphant rival, Roald Amundsen,...

Scientists connected with NASA's Kepler space telescope have announced the discovery of a planet orbiting a Sun-like star that may resemble our own world. Its name is Kepler-22b.

No, it's not Earth's identical twin -- it's not a doppelganger of our planetary home. Kepler-22b is somewhat more than twice the...

According to a Roper poll conducted two decades ago, nearly four million Americans suspect they've been abducted by space aliens. The experience is not always pleasant, as the aliens refuse to subscribe to the Geneva Conventions. Their victims are frequently laid out on tables and treated to unauthorized and unsavory...

I've often fantasized about visiting the Bahamian beach where Columbus first stumbled ashore in 1492. Sadly, no one knows where that beach is. In fact, no one's even sure which island Columbus first encountered (there are three candidates).

It's a pity, a disappointment, and a lost revenue source for the...

The rain of planets continues. In the past few weeks astronomers have ponied up at least ten times as many planets as were discovered in the previous 200-thousand-year history of our species. Needless to say, all of these planets orbit stars other than the Sun. They are someone else's backyard...

The Astronomer Royal of Britain, Sir Martin Rees, stood before the crowd to make a deceptively straightforward point about modern research: "Chimpanzees cannot appreciate the issues in a field such as quantum mechanics, much less solve them," he said.

The learned crowd, assembled at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California...

Despite the preferred modus operandi of the classical Greeks, there are some science puzzles that can't be solved by just sitting around, sipping retsina and cranking up your brain.

Oh, sure, there are plenty of physicists torture-testing their cerebrums with string theory, despite any proof from the labs that this...

You can hear the sounds of gnashing teeth and wringing hands. The Space Shuttle is loping towards the sunset, leaving the United States without its own means for putting people in orbit for the first time in a half-century. And the James Webb Space Telescope, the anointed successor to the...

According to Star Trek mythos, Starfleet Command -- operational headquarters for a flotilla of craft that keep the cosmic peace -- is located in San Francisco's Presidio, in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge (still carrying traffic, even in the 23rd century). Starfleet Academy, boot camp for future Starfleet...

When I was in high school, struggling through Latin, I assumed that what brought down the Roman Empire was the lack of movie theaters.

Movies are not only mass entertainment -- they're also communal. Sure, the Christian vs. carnivore acts at the Coliseum were communal too. But Rome had only...

It's late afternoon on May 21, the Day of Rapture, and despite repeated gazes through my window, I've failed to see bodies headed skyward to confound local air traffic and rendezvous with the angels.

This admits to only two explanations: Either none of my neighbors qualify for salvation, or...

The Allen Telescope Array, a major instrument designed to speed up our hunt for intelligent beings elsewhere in the galaxy, has been turned off.

On April 15, this phalanx of small antennas, built to eavesdrop on signals that might reach us from civilizations hundreds of trillions of...

Each year, thousands of UFOs are sighted and reported, which is an impressive tally of unidentified aerial phenomena. Surveys show that roughly one-third of the populace believes that at least some of this sky show is due to extraterrestrial spacecraft, here to probe our airspace and, when that proves boring,...