How many intelligent civilizations should there be in our galaxy right now? In 1961, U.S. astrophysicist Frank Drake, who passed away on September 2 at the age of 92, came up with an equation to ...

This places Drake in the company of towering physicists with equations named after them, including James Clerk Maxwell and Erwin Schrödinger. Unlike those, Drake’s equation does not encapsulate a law ...

The question of whether we are alone in the universe has plagued humanity since the dawn of time. It's answer, one way or the other, could fundamentally alter our understanding of life, evolution, ...

There are few ideas in science that capture the imagination quite like the search for extraterrestrial life. From Mars missions and exoplanet surveys to SETI's decades-long hunt for signals, ...