A provocative theory circulating among artificial intelligence researchers suggests that once machines achieve human-level intelligence and beyond, they might create something entirely unexpected: a ...

The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. One of the persistent ...

Despite the vast differences in human and bee brains, both of us can do mathematics. As we argue in a new paper published in the journal Leonardo, our thought experiment lends weight to the idea that ...

In the third week of August 1977, Ohio State University astronomer Jerry Ehrman was going over a computer printout of signals collected a few days earlier from his university’s “Big Ear” radio ...

A recent theory proposed by a NASA scientist suggests that extraterrestrial civilizations may not possess the wildly advanced technology that many UFO enthusiasts expect. This perspective, which ...

In his classic science fiction novel Contact, Carl Sagan remarked, “The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.” Physicist Enrico Fermi is credited with ...

Researchers at SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) might be looking for the wrong thing, says one of SETI's astronomers in The Guardian. They're looking for aliens that are like us.

TV has taught us many important lessons about aliens.They are either here to observe us, replace us, eat our cats, or gently judge our emotional intelligence while wearing a bathrobe. Sometimes all ...