Frank Donald Drake PhD is an American astronomer and astrophysicist. He is most notable as one of the pioneers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, including the founding of SETI, mounting the first observational attempts at detecting extraterrestrial communications in 1960 in Project Ozma, developing the Drake equation, and as the creator of the Arecibo Message, a digital encoding of an astronomical and biological description of the Earth and its lifeforms for transmission into the cosmos.

Born on May 28, 1930 in Chicago, as a youth Drake loved electronics and chemistry. He reports that he considered the possibility of life existing on other planets as an 8-year-old, but never discussed the idea with his family or teachers due to the prevalent religious ideology.

He enrolled at Cornell University on a Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship. Once there he began studying astronomy. His ideas about the possibility of extraterrestrial life were reinforced by a lecture from astrophysist Otto Struve in 1951. After college, he served briefly as an electronics officer on the USS Albany. He then went on to graduate school at Harvard in radio astronomy.

Nick Sagan (born September 16, 1970 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of the science fiction novels Idlewild, Edenborn, and Everfree, and his screen credits include episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager. He is the son of astronomer Carl Sagan and artist and writer Linda Salzman.

At age six, Nick Sagan's greeting, "Hello from the children of planet Earth," was recorded and placed aboard NASA’s Voyager Golden Record. Launched with a selection of terrestrial greetings, sights, sounds and music, the Voyager I and Voyager II spacecraft have since left the solar system and are now the most distant human-made objects in the universe. He went to The Mirman School as a child and received his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Sagan has been steadily writing for Hollywood since 1992, crafting screenplays, teleplays, animation episodes and computer games. He is a younger half-brother to Dorion Sagan and Jeremy Sagan. He has worked for a variety of studios and production companies, including Paramount, Warner Brothers, New Line, Universal, Disney, actor/producer Tom Cruise, and directors David Fincher and Martin Scorsese. Sagan co-wrote the award-winning computer adventure game, Zork Nemesis: The Forbidden Lands. His film credits include adaptations of novels by Orson Scott Card, Ursula K. LeGuin, Pierre Ouellette and Charles Pellegrino. His television credits include two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and five episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, where he worked as a story editor. At the turn of the millennium, astronaut Sally Ride recruited him to work for SPACE.com as Executive Producer of Entertainment & Games. During his tenure there, the spark for a series of novels came to Sagan, The Idlewild Trilogy, which he sold to Penguin Putnam in 2002.

Jill Cornell Tarter (born Jan 16, 1944) is an American astronomer and the outgoing director of the Center for SETI Research, holding the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute.

Tarter received her undergraduate education at Cornell University, where she earned a Bachelor of Engineering Physics Degree, and a Master's degree and PhD in astronomy from the University of California at Berkeley.

Tarter has worked on a number of major scientific projects, most relating to the search for extraterrestrial life. As a graduate student, she worked on the radio-search project SERENDIP, and created the corresponding backronym, "Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations." She was project scientist for NASA's High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS) in 1992 and 1993 and subsequently director of Project Phoenix (HRMS reconfigured) under the auspices of the SETI Institute. She was co-creator with Margaret Turnbull of the HabCat in 2002, a principal component of Project Phoenix. Tarter has published dozens of technical papers and lectures extensively both on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the need for proper science education. She is credited with coining the term "brown dwarf" for the classification of stars with insufficient mass to sustain hydrogen fusion. She has spent 35 years in the quest for extraterrestrial life and announced her retirement in 2012.

Seth Shostak (born July 20, 1943) is an American astronomer. He grew up in Arlington, VA and earned his physics degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology.

He is the Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and the 2004 winner of the Klumpke-Roberts Award awarded by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the public understanding and appreciation of astronomy.

Before his involvement with SETI research, he used radio telescopes in the USA and the Netherlands, searching for clues to the ultimate fate of the universe by analyzing galaxy motion.

In addition to his experience as an active participant in SETI research, Shostak is also involved as a science educator. He presented twelve 30-minute lectures on audio-tape and video titled "The Search for Intelligent Life in Space" for the Teaching Company in 1999.

Since February 2002 Shostak has hosted the SETI Institute's radio program Are We Alone? which was renamed "Big Picture Science" in July 2011. Each week, Shostak interviews guests about the latest scientific research on a variety of topics: cosmology, physics, genetics, paleontology, evolutionary biology and astrobiology. Big Picture Science is distributed on the Public Radio Satellite System and the Public Radio Exchange and is available for download at the SETI Institute's website and through podcasts.

Carl Edward Sagan ( /ˈseɪɡɪn/; November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and natural sciences. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. He advocated scientifically skeptical inquiry and the scientific method, pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Sagan is known for his popular science books and for the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which he narrated and co-wrote. The book Cosmos was published to accompany the series. Sagan wrote the novel Contact, the basis for a 1997 film of the same name.

Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Ukrainian Jewish family. His father, Sam Sagan, was an immigrant garment worker from Kamenets-Podolsk, Ukraine; his mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, a housewife. Carl was named in honor of Rachel's biological mother, Chaiya Clara, in Sagan's words, "the mother she never knew." Sagan graduated from Rahway High School in Rahway, New Jersey, in 1951.