Dan Berkenstock and his team at Skybox Imaging are rethinking how to take photographs from space.

Like a modern-day Indiana Jones, Sarah Parcak uses satellite images to locate lost ancient sites. The winner of the 2016 TED Prize, her wish is to protect the world’s shared cultural heritage.

TED Senior Fellow Alexander MacDonald develops strategies to advance space exploration and encourage private-sector space activities.

An engineer with Google (he helped build Google Earth), Bruno Bowden is also an enthusiastic folder of paper.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alison Killing uses satellite imagery and architectural techniques to investigate urgent social issues.

Julia Bacha is the creative director at Just Vision, an organization that uses film and multimedia storytelling to foster constructive conversations on some of the most divisive issues of our times.

Robert Fischell invented the rechargeable pacemaker, the implantable insulin pump, and devices that warn of epileptic seizures and heart attacks. Yet it's not just his inventive genius that makes him fascinating, but his determination to make the world a better place.

Climate scientist Kate Marvel looks at the big picture of environmental change.

Danielle Wood designs satellites and space technology applications that contribute to sustainable development.

Through his mesmerizing satellite photographs, Benjamin Grant offers us a new way of seeing of our planet and ourselves.

Whether she’s inventing satellite radio, developing life-saving drugs or digitizing the human mind, Martine Rothblatt has a knack for turning visionary ideas into commonplace technology.

Gavin McCormick is a cofounder of the Climate TRACE coalition, which combines satellites and artificial intelligence to detect human-caused greenhouse gases from all major sources.

Greg Asner’s mapping technology produces detailed, complex pictures of how humans’ activities affect our ecosystems.

Andrea Ghez is a stargazing detective, tracking the visible and invisible forces lurking in the vastness of interstellar space.

At Gearbox, Kamau Gachigi empowers Kenya's next generation of creators to prototype and fabricate their visions.

Gayle King is a co-host of "CBS This Morning” and Editor-at-Large of the award-winning O, the Oprah Magazine.

Jay Walker is fascinated by intellectual property in all its forms. His firm, Walker Digital, created Priceline and many other businesses that reframe old problems with new IT. In his private life, he's a bibliophile and collector on an epic scale.

UPS's Wanis Kabbaj seeks new ways of understanding the growing complexity of our congested cities and globalized world.

Architect David Rockwell draws on his love of drama and spectacle to create fantastic, high-impact restaurants, cultural facilities, airline terminals, theater sets -- and playgrounds.

Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist John C. Mather leads the science team behind NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful telescope ever launched into space.

Lynn Rothschild is passionate about the origin and evolution of life on earth or elsewhere -- while at the same time pioneering the use of synthetic biology to enable space exploration.

Natalie Panek's work is focused on the idea that accountability for our environments never goes away.

TED Fellow Moriba Jah studies and predicts the motion of objects in space in an effort to make space safe, secure and sustainable.

Stephen Lawler and the Virtual Earth team have created an addictively interactive 3D world that is poised to reinvent our view of advertising, gaming, weather/traffic reporting, instant messaging and more.

As founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, Peter Beck oversees the manufacturing and launch of rockets designed to put small satellites into orbit.

Astrophysicist, cosmologist and Nobel Prize winner George Smoot studies the cosmic microwave background radiation -- the afterglow of the Big Bang. His pioneering research into deep space and time is uncovering the structure of the universe itself.

Phil Plait has spent his life evangelizing science, getting the word out about the real world and how we know what we know about it.

Philip Lubin studies the physics of the universe.

Space Archeologist

Crisis photographer