It's going to be a very, very long time before we have a telescope big enough to spot little green men waving at us from the surface of another world. What we might be able to spot in the near future, though, are their farms and gardens, with a spectral technique that looks for the signatures of alien plants in polarized light.

The surface of Venus is not a pleasant place to live. It's really freakin' hot (900 degrees), the pressure is stifling (92 times Earth normal), and the clouds are made of sulfur dioxide. We're pretty sure that nothing could survive down there, especially not some imaginary scorpions that a Russian scientist thinks he sees in old pictures of Venus' surface.

Earth has a nasty habit of recycling its surface such that old stuff (like dinosaur bones and meteor craters and ancient alien cities) get swallowed up by oceans and volcanoes or eroded into dust. The moon, however, hasn't been geologically active for a very long time, and if aliens ever stopped by our solar system, the moon might be the place to check for artifacts.

Remember a while back when we wrote about the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence's (SETI) Allen Telescope Array (ATA) was shut down due to lack of funding? It seems the government wasn't keen on supporting the search for our interstellar neighbors, so SETI turned to you for help. Guess what guys…we did it! The Allen Array is back in business!