Our First Contact With Aliens Might Be With Their Robots

Refined stellar yardstick helps astronomers improve stellar evolution models. A globular cluster as seen by the Hubble telescope. Researchers working on Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) efforts hunt for the same thing that their predecessors sought for decades--a sign that life arose, as Carl Sagan would say, on another humdrum planet around another humdrum star and rose up into something technologically advanced. It could happen any day. A weird, brief flash in the night sky.