As I look at my team at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, and at a handful of other SETI teams around the globe, I see very clever individuals who have been willing to forgo the traditional challenges and rewards of academic research to work on a program of immense potential -- to do work that can literally change the world.

CNN: What if there's somebody else out there?

Now that computing has gotten fast enough, now that Amazon Web Services, Dell, Intel, Google and others have donated resources to the SETI Institute, my team and I can benefit from your skills and your energy.

CNN: What if there's somebody else out there?