AP Photo

Looking up at the canopy of stars in the night sky, and realizing that each point of light is a star system not so unlike our own, one can't help but wonder about those extraterrestrial worlds that we know exist around a tremendous fraction of them.

With hundreds of billions of stars and (possibly) upwards of a trillion planets, it's been known for a very long time that there's a definite, real chance that other intelligent life exists right now in our own galaxy.