This isn't quite true. We know life has formed on our planet, but even on our planet which has all the ingredients for advanced life, at a fundamental level what emerged out of the primordial ooze has it's roots in one event. There isn't evidence that life forming is common even here. For instance, there are several different conformational shaped DNA's phosphate backbone can exist in (alpha, beta, z-DNA, etc); yet all life utilizes just one. The key metabolic pathways are all conserved and reused and built on as things advanced. The same kinases and enzymes exist. Neurons got faster by first doing the obvious biophysical scaling of getting fatter and then myelin appeared and became ubiquitous in higher organisms. Even human brains are modular and demonstrate the existence the prior spinal chord and limbic system being built upon by the neocortex. And during development it's common to learn that development recapitulates evolution of the nervous system. Everything can be traces back to that one event. Even here the probabilities aren't looking good.
And we know there is no intelligent life in the solar system. This is clear from the energy spectra and EM radiation we've measured. We really aren't "cosmically blind" -- we can see all the way back to the beginning of the universe and deep into the distance at a time that early star formation was already underway and should have produced life. We're actually cosmic latecomers, according to the Drake equation, there should be a Gaussian distribution of civilizations at different points of advancement, with many, many of them in the middle spewing out EM radiation that we should have picked up. All we have is one bizarre "Wow!" signal in 1977 and the newly discovered FRB phenomena which most astrophysicists believe to be natural in origin.
Looking out, we can be reasonably sure based on the priors we have from earth that it's a low probability that life has evolved within our light-cone, which is the only observable universe that we can ever see.
I posted two excellent papers on this topic here.
Sucks, but it's very unlikely that intelligent life exists out there. Life, sure, maybe even some really neat shit has evolved. But for the little guys in Area 51, it's not looking good.
