Public Broadcasting for Northwest Indiana & Chicagoland since 1987
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
We are experiencing intermittent outages with our digital stream. We are sorry for the inconvenience. You can still tune into 89.1 FM live on your radio.

We’ve Been Looking for Aliens for 70 Years. We've Been Doing It Wrong All Along

Season 11 Episode 29 | 20m 48s

We’ve been looking for messages from the stars ever since Frank Drake pointed the Green Bank radio telescope at Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridany 65 years ago. He saw nothing that couldn’t be explained by natural causes. Nor have the much more extensive SETI surveys conducted since. So, maybe there are no alien signals to see. Or maybe we need to update how we search for them.

Aired: 06/03/26
Physicists hope Planck stars can save us from black hole singularities and paradoxes.
Galaxies older than the universe? Webb's findings keep defying our best explanations.
Earth's core: solid or liquid? Yes — we know more about distant galaxies than our own interior.
Gödel found a time-travel solution in General Relativity, revealing spacetime can loop on itself.
Tardigrades can survive almost anything—even most of Mars. But one Martian chemical stops even them.
The Higgs boson may open a portal to hidden particles that could explain dark matter.
The universe expands faster. “Dark energy” may not be constant after all.
There’s a new generation of experiments that may unlock the gravity particle.
The universe thrums with quantum fields, except something may be missing: the sterile neutrino.
Gravitons, the particle of quantum gravity, may be impossible to detect.