Think we're not alone in the universe? Many scientists at NASA would agree with you, and at a Monday panel discussion they said the world is much closer to finding its "twin" out there than most people know.

"We believe we are very close in terms of science and technology to finding another Earth, and signs of life on another world," Sara Seager, a professor of planetary science and physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said at the panel according to a Los Angeles Times report.

Conducted at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the hour-long discussion featured scientists, astronomers and former astronauts on how NASA plans to search for life on other planets both within and far beyond our solar system.

"Do we believe there is life beyond Earth?" NASA administrator Charles Bolden asked in his opening remarks. "I would venture to say that most of my colleagues here today say it is improbable that in the limitless vastness of the universe we humans stand alone."

The past few years alone have seen major technological advances in our understanding of the solar system and the nearby universe outside it. The Kelper Space Telescope, launched in 2009, has revealed that nearly every star in our (Milky Way) galaxy is orbited by at least one planet.

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"We already know that our galaxy has at least 100 billion planets, and we didn't know that five years ago," Matt Mountain, the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, said at the panel according to CNN.com.

Four years from now, NASA will launch the James Webb Space Telescope, which will help scientists discover whether any of those planets has the right chemical makeup and atmospheric gases for life to exist.

But even with the new telescope, finding these planets and researching them will still be a tremendous challenge -- because they're incredibly distant and because their light is outshone by the Sun-like stars they orbit.

"With the James Webb, we have the first capability of finding life on other planets, but we have to get lucky; we have to beat the odds," Seager told the Los Angeles Times.

The James Webb Telescope is a successor to the Hubble Telescope, which launched in 1990 and captures stunning images of galaxies deep in distant space. But it does so from roughly 350 miles above Earth's surface; the Webb Telescope will do its work from 930,000 miles away.

Thanks to the Hubble and other instruments, NASA scientists now know where every star is located within 200 light years of the Sun, CNN pointed out. The scientists at Monday's panel said that if they follow this map of the stars, they should be able to find many, many new planets.

"Every star in the sky has a sun, and if our sun has planets, we naturally expect those other stars to have planets also, and they do," Seager said at the panel. If you look up in the night sky and wonder which stars have planets, she added, the answer would be "basically every single one."

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Liftoff of Space Shuttle Endeavour

Billows of smoke and steam infused with the fiery light from space shuttle Endeavour's launch on the STS-127 mission fill NASA Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39A. Endeavour lifted off on the mission's sixth launch attempt, on July 15, 2009 at 6:03 p.m. EDT.