Apparently we might not be alone in the universe: Researchers and scientists predict that humanity will discover extraterrestrial life in as early as 20 years.

At a meeting of lawmakers and top scientists, in the middle of last month, scientists told America's legislature that humanity is closer than ever to making contact with extraterrestrial life. Dan Werthimer of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research Center at the University of California, told the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology that it would be strange to know that we are alone in the universe. Werthimer said the universe is more likely to be "teeming with primitive life," the Huffington Post U.K. reported.

Werthimer directs Berkeley's new SETI Research Center. Werthimer and astrobiologist Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, mentioned and described to the committee current projects that they have been working on to find intelligent life on other planets. NASA's Kepler space observatory is contributing to their research efforts, the U.S. Berkeley News Center reported.

One of Werthimer and his teams' newest project was "eavesdropping SETI" and its latest tools, including the Allen Telescope Array in northern California, which is now operated by the SETI Institute. Project "Eavesdropping SETI" provides the team the ability to listen only when two planets in a distant system are aligned with Earth. This ability gives Earth the opportunity to intercept any such targeted communications.

The Kepler mission has illustrated that the Milky Way Galaxy has a trillion planets and three times the number of stars. They have determined that there are billions of Earth sized planets and are "habitable" in the so called "Goldilocks" zone: It is neither too distant from nor too close to the host star, providing the perfect, life-sustaining temperatures, the U.S. Berkeley News Center reported.

"[There are] plenty of places where life could emerge and evolve," Werthimer said.

SETI, operated by UC Berkeley, has been the longest-running search for extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI also houses the popular crowd-sourced computing project SETI@home. It is Werthimer's searches that have piggybacked on the world's largest radio telescope, Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico.

Since 1999, the data has been funneled into SETI@home, and this system allows volunteers to use their "idle computer time to search for patterns in extraterrestrial radio signals that might be an indication of intelligent life."

Werthimer explained to Congress that it is without the funding for space research and domestic programmes designed to search for aliens from Earth, such as SETI, that would make the discovery take even longer.