"In 1995, my colleague [and Noble Prize laureate] Didier Queloz discovered the first planet outside our solar system," Quanz said during the opening of the institute's new Center for the Origin and Prevalence of Life earlier in September. "Today, more than 5,000 exoplanets are known and we are discovering them on a daily basis."

Of those thousands of exoplanets, dozens are believed to be at least potentially habitable, with the conditions on their surface ripe for liquid water. And as he said, that number is growing all the time.

Eoin Treacy's view

I suspect we will “see” extraterrestrial life well before we ever meet real life aliens. Technological innovations like the James Webb Telescope and future much more advanced space telescopes will have the capacity to see into the atmospheres of distant planets.