From extraterrestrial intelligence to simple life forms, the Universe might be teeming with life. Can we find and communicate with these life forms? IFLScience spoke to Dr Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute, for the first episode of IFLScience The Big Questions. Together we wondered: are we alone in the Universe?
You can listen to this episode and subscribe to the podcast on all your favorite podcast apps: Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, Podbean, Amazon Music, and more. A transcript of the conversation is available here.


![A dense cluster of bright stars, each with six large and two small diffraction spikes, due to the telescope’s optics. They have a variety of sizes depending on their brightness and distance from us in the cluster, and different colours reflecting different types of star. Patches of billowing red gas can be seen in and around the cluster, lit up by the stars. Small stars in the cluster blend into a background of distant stars and galaxies on black.]](https://assets.iflscience.com/assets/articleNo/77446/aImg/81193/glittering-m.jpg)

