Meet the real people who are looking for E.T.

The search for aliens is a very real thing and it’s no joke.

For decades, people have dedicated their lives to answering the age-old question: are we alone in the universe? And they don’t look like this:

Instead, they are astronomers, planetary scientists, astrophysicists and geographers: people who use science as a basis for looking for what seems the impossible.

READ MORE:This mysterious finding has scientists talking about aliens

There are billions of galaxies and hundreds of billions of stars in our one galaxy alone. And recently we have come to realize that most stars have planets around them. Using telescopes like the Kepler Space Telescope among others, astronomers and planetary scientists are learning about the chance of finding an Earth-like planet that we believe is capable of supporting life.

From there, it’s a question about how many advanced technological civilizations are out in the universe. And believe it or not, there’s an equation that calculates just that. Called the Drake Equation, it continues to serve as a basis in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

There are scientific institutions around the world dedicated to searching for life, such as SETI Australia Centre, SETI Italia and, perhaps the most well-known thanks to the 1997 movie Contact (based on a Carl Sagan novel) featuring Jodie Foster, the SETI Institute.

Essentially these organizations use radio telescopes that are pointed to a star that scientists believe have the best chance of possessing habitable planets with a chance of one of them being home to an advanced technological civilization: the star can’t be too big, as large, hot stars tend to live fast and die young; and the star must be stable, for example not releasing any high-energy radiation.

Yes, we are listening to static. But not in the Jodie Foster way seen in Contact. Instead, that job is automated, with the computer alerting scientists to any promising signal.

The SETI Institute in California has been searching for signals from space for more than 30 years. The organization was funded by NASA for a short time, but now relies on private donations and contributions. In fact, the 42 radio telescopes at the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in California belonging to the SETI Institute was largely funded by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft.

Gerald Harp, a senior astrophysicist at the SETI Institute who works the ATA, has been working at SETI for 15 years.

Harp said that in the last five years, data has been collected on 12,000 stars, with about 1,000 of those analyzed by scientists. That might sound like a lot, but it’s all about perspective.

“The problem is, the universe is so big,” he said. “We’re in a galaxy with 100 billion stars, so 10,000 is not that large a number.”

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "The problem is, the universe is so big," he said. "We're in a galaxy with 100 billion stars, so 10,000 is not that large a number."

Of course, there have been lots of promising signals that failed to yield a real signal.

One of the most famous ones came in 1977 when astronomer Jerry Ehmann who worked at the Big Ear Radio Telescope in Ohio received a signal that blew the recording instrumentation off the charts. Ehmann circled the code in the printouts and wrote, “Wow!” in the margin. But that was it. The signal was never received again. It has come to be known as the “Wow Signal.”

“I don’t think the ‘Wow Signal’ is of any significance,” Harp said. His doubt is understandable: not only was the signal never heard again, the second telescope that was pointed at the same region never picked it up in the first place.

But that’s not to say that there’s nobody out there.

Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, said that he’s bet everyone at the SETI Institute a coffee that a signal will be found within “two dozen years.”

“Of course, I think that’s reasonable: I haven’t bet anyone a Maserati.”

And when it comes to the search for signals, you can get that image of Jodie Foster sitting on the hood of her car in the desert listening to static on headphones out of your head.

Shostak said that at any one time, the telescopes are scanning 20-30 million channels.

WATCH: Do Aliens Exist? Seth Shostak on Space Exploration

“You’d need to be wearing 10 to 15 million headphones,” he said laughing.

“It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Shostak said of the search for a signal. “The trick is how fast you’re going through the haystack and how many needles are in there.”

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "It's like looking for a needle in a haystack," Shostak said of the search for a signal. "The trick is how fast you're going through the haystack and how many needles are in there."

But since the SETI Institute was founded in 1984 technological advances have vastly increased the number of star systems they can examine. So the chances of humanity scanning more star systems faster increases exponentially.

As for the mysterious findings around a new star that astronomers can’t yet explain, Shostak — who has dedicated his life to searching for a signal — is a skeptical.

READ MORE: Alien life could be found within 20 to 30 years, says one NASA scientist

“I think it’s an interesting object. Do I think it’s alien? I doubt it.”

Even if we found an advanced civilization, with current technology we could never reach them. So why bother?

“It’s curiosity,” said Shostak. “We have curiosity. And we’ve developed that curiosity for its survival value.” As hunter and gatherers, knowing what was over the hill kept us alive. And exploration of our own planet — just for the sake of exploration — has been invaluable to our survival.

So, is humanity ready to find out that we are not alone?

“I think there would be a great deal of interest, but I don’t think people would panic,” said Harp. “The public is kind of prepared, I think, for such a discovery.”

Shostak agrees.

“A lot of people figure that the news would be kept a secret,” he said. “I think this would be a big story, but I think the public would react with curiosity.”

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