Although Juliana García-Mejía and Karina Mathew study very different fields today at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the two share a preoccupation, reflected in their research, with the prospect of worlds beyond our own. Both are advancing knowledge in ways that could change the way we think about the search for extraterrestrial life. And both are doing work that forces us to reconsider the place of humanity in the stars—and in our own stories.