The Googleplex is the corporate headquarters complex of Google, Inc., located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California, United States, near San Jose. "Googleplex" is a portmanteau of Google and complex, and a reference to googolplex, the name given to the large number 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰, or 10^googol.

The Googleplex is one of the company's 23 U.S. and Canadian locations. Google also maintains 23 European locations, 14 Asia/Pacific locations, 5 Middle East locations, and 3 Latin American locations.^{[dated info]}

The four core buildings, totaling 47,038 square meters (506,310 sq ft), were built for and originally occupied by Silicon Graphics (SGI). The office space and corporate campus is located within a larger 26-acre (110,000 m²) site that contains Charleston Park, a 5-acre (20,000 m²) public park; improved access to Permanente Creek; and public roads that connect the corporate site to Shoreline Park and the Bay Trail. The project, launched in 1994 to reclaim a former industrial brownfield site, was a creative collaboration between SGI, SWA Group of San Francisco, Sausalito, and the Planning and Community Development Agency of the City of Mountain View.^{[citation needed]} The objective was to develop in complementary fashion the privately-owned corporate headquarters and adjoining public greenspace. Key design decisions placed parking for nearly 2000 cars underground, enabling SWA to integrate the two open spaces with water features, shallow pools, fountains, pathways, plazas, and a gigantic statue of a dinosaur. The project was completed in 1997. The ASLA noted in 1999 that the SGI project was a significant departure from typical corporate campuses, challenging conventional thinking about private and public space.

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.