Nidhal Guessoum is an astrophysicist at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates and the author of Islam’s Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science. As part of a panel discussion on the implications of finding other worlds at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science […]

Florence Raulin Cerceau is a director at Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence and an associate professor at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. She is a historian of astrobiology and of the search for intelligent alien life.

Douglas Vakoch is president of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a San Francisco nonprofit research and educational organization dedicated to transmitting intentional signals to nearby stars. He has said that while there may be some problems for religion when intelligent aliens are discovered, they may not be as large as some people think.

Michael A.G. Michaud is a writer who specializes in technology and science. He is the author of Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears About Encountering Extraterrestrials and has written many articles on the possibility and potential impact of contacting intelligent extraterrestrials.

Seth Shostak is the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. He is often the public face of SETI — and therefore the public face of the scientific search for intelligent life beyond our solar system. He is the author of Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Nathalie Cabrol is a senior research scientist and director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. She is an astrobiologist and planetary scientist. She contributed an essay on SETI for the book Aliens: The World’s Leading Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Lewis Dartnell is an astrobiologist and a science communicator at the University of Westminster in London. He gives frequent lectures on the search for intelligent alien life, what it might look like and want and how it might change us. He is the author of Life in the Universe: A Beginner’s Guide.

Sir Martin Rees is a cosmologist, Astronomer Royal of the British Empire, a member of the House of Lords and the winner of the Templeton Prize in 2011. He contributed an essay on man’s place in the universe to Aliens: The World’s Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In 2010 he said in […]

Jim Al-Khalili is a professor of physics at the University of Surrey in Guildford, England, and a frequent presenter of television programs about science for the BBC and Britain’s Channel 4. He is the editor of Aliens: The World’s Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life.