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When a big name like CNN bringing forth an article about the 13 billion-year-old Milky Way possibly being home to thousands of intelligent civilizations, a little more weight is garnered for believers in life on other planets—especially Earth-like planets with some form of water.  Not a new thing to life-on-Mars followers who have been following the story of detected methane in the Mars' atmosphere , any additional news regarding the possibility of life on another planet is exciting.

In a study led by Duncan Forgan, a paper was published in the International Journal of Astrobiology concluding that at least 361 intelligent civilizations have been found to have emerged in the Milky Way since it was first created, with a possibility of 38,00 of them being formed. With this being the first time a specific number has been put on the Milky Way's intelligent civilizations, other scientists are saying that number could be in the hundreds or thousands. According to CNN, all of this research was done through Scotland's researchers at the Edinburgh with a supercomputer, crunching the results of a synthetic galaxy with billions of stars and planets.  The galaxy model had been studied in order to see how its life would evolve under a series of conditions of its virtual world.

NASA is working at trying to find inhabitable life on other Earth-size planets with their Kepler Mission, successfully launched on March 6, 2009. Presently over 250,000 miles away, the spacecraft is carrying a telescope and a computer series while traveling at a rate of 10 million miles per year or five miles per second.  With large planets seen within the next couple of months, it is expected to see Earth-like planets within the next two to three years, but presently a dust cover is on the front of Kepler's science instrument, called a photometer, which will help the NASA engineers to characterize the instrumental electronic noise.

Another way to search for extraterrestrial life in private homes is through the SETI@home organization, which provides BOINC software to be used through the computers as a screen saver with the key URL http://setiathome.burkeley.edu when prompted. Used for  scientific computing, once the screensaver is up and running  the computer's idle time can be used for not only through SETI's search for extraterrestrial life while analyzing radio telescope data, but also through Climateprediction.net, Rosetta@home, World Community Grid, and so forth—connecting to as many programs as a person wants once hooked up.