One of those participants is Russell John of Dhaka, Bangladesh. A self-confessed "search addict," he began donating his time to SETI@home at age 16 with a high school friend. "The main motivation," he explains, "was that if the SETI@home project found some ET signals from our data, the data we crunched, then we would get some sort of credit for mapping ET life." He has continued to run searches on every computer he's owned for the last 20 years.

SETI@home's Bangladesh team has been participating in the project since 1 March 1999, and has conducted 565,918 "cobblestones" of work (488.95 quadrillion floating-point operations). John has contributed about 20,000 of them.

For Tarter, who is now fundraising full-time for the SETI Institute, these are still exciting times for the search. With powerful new telescopes having discovered more than 2,300 new planets around the solar system, "Earth 2.0 [is] right around the corner," she told Space.com. "We can almost taste it."