By Elizabeth Howell on March 8th, 2013 on UniverseToday
Earth. It seems so solid and permanent. But really, all you need to do is expand the Sun enough, and the entire planet would melt away. Or worse, find yourself at the mercy of some seriously powerful and angry aliens.

Actually, the beings who destroy Earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which first aired on BBC Radio 4 on this day (March 8) in 1978, were not so much angry as logical about their reasons.

In the novel, Earthlings are shocked when extraterrestrial beings — known as the Vogons — arrive with plans to build a hyperspatial express route that runs through Earth’s orbit. The plans for the route were apparently lodged in Alpha Centauri (a star system four light-years away) for the past 50 Earth years, leaving residents of the planet “plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint.”

By Ray Villard on April 30th, 2011 on news.discovery.com

The sad unplugging of the Allen Telescope Array due to lack of funding brings a screeching halt, at least temporarily, to the most ambitious search for “hello” radio transmissions from E.T.

But perhaps it’s time to simply think far outside of the box regarding our preconceptions of how to find extraterrestrial civilizations, says Clement Vidal of the Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. And, the most advanced aliens may be the easiest to find.

By Rebecca Boyle on April 11th, 2011 on Popular Science

Aliens could conceivably live on planets illuminated by the swirling mass of photons orbiting the singularity of a special type of black hole, according to a new theory.

Certain black holes are charged and rotate, and they possess a region past the event horizon — the point of no return — in which the fabric of spacetime appears normal again. This is called the inner Cauchy horizon. Aliens could conceivably live on planets illuminated by the swirling mass of photons orbiting the singularity of a special type of black hole, according to a new theory.

By Ryan Anderson on November 19, 2009 on Universe Today

What would happen if humans could deliberately create a blackhole? Well, for starters we might just unlock the ultimate energy source to create the ultimate spacecraft engine — a potential  “black hole-drive” –  to propel ships to the stars.

It turns out black holes are not black at all; they give off “Hawking radiation” that causes them to lose energy (and therefore mass) over time. For large black holes, the amount of radiation produced is miniscule, but very small black holes rapidly turn their mass into a huge amount of energy.