Rabbi Mark Hillel Kunis has written about Torah portions that support the idea that God created life on other worlds. He lives in Atlanta.

Matthew Stanley is an astronomer and a professor of the history and philosophy of science at New York University. In 2016, he gave a talk at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society on the question of whether we are alone in the universe, and if we are not, what would that mean to our […]

Jim Funaro is an anthropology instructor at Cabrillo College in Aptos, Calif., and founder of the Contact Conference, an interdisciplinary conference on the future focused on contact with aliens. One of his main areas of interest is the cultural impacts of contact with alien life.

Albert A. Harrison is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Starstruck: Cosmic Visions in Science, Religion and Folklore and After Contact: The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life.

Salman Hameed is an astronomer and associate professor of integrated science and humanities at Hampshire College. He is director of the Center for the Study of Science in Muslim Societies.  He operates the science and religion blog called Irtiqa, which emphasizes debates about science in the Islamic world.

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.

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.

Sarah Scoles is a science journalist and former associate editor of Astronomy magazine. She is the author of Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. She is based in Denver.