During a panel discussion Monday, some of NASA's top scientists said they believe the space agency is closer than they have ever been to determining if there is life away from Earth.

According to the Los Angeles Times, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, a former astronaut, started the discussion by explaining how the space agency planned on searching for extraterrestrial life. He said during past missions into space he would always keep an eye out for any and all types of alien life, but never found one.

"Do we believe there is life beyond Earth?" he said in his address. "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 panel lasted more than an hour and NASA hosted the event in their Washington D.C. headquarters, CNN reported. Though there were several different voices on the panel, the consensus among them was that Earth could not be the only planet in the universe's vast expanses with life on its surface.

"We believe we're very, very close in terms of technology and science to actually finding the other Earth and our chance to find signs of life on another world," Sara Seager, a MacArthur Fellow and professor of planetary science and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said during the panel.

In a press release after the event, NASA said new technology and the capabilities of today's telescopes allow scientists to determine the distance at which an exoplanet orbits its host star. This is important because the right distance would put the planet in a "habitable zone," meaning the planet would have the right conditions to host life. NASA is currently using space-based telescopes like the Hubble, Spitzer, and Kepler.

"Just imagine the moment, when we find potential signatures of life," Matt Mountain, director at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said during the panel. "Imagine the moment when the world wakes up and the human race realizes that its long loneliness in time and space may be over - the possibility we're no longer alone in the universe."