And rejecting a logical hypothesis because it doesn't fit with our preconceived views of the cosmos has never led us astray either.
Earlier (modern) thinking on the existence of intelligent life in the universe tended towards fairly high estimates of the potential number of advanced civilizations in the universe. The Drake equation has been used to estimate the probability of civilizations in our galaxy that could be detected using a radio telescope. The Drake equation starts with the number of new stars forming in the galaxy every year over the life of the galaxy and then applies a series of probabilities that these stars have planets capable of sustaining life, that the planets develop life, that life evolves to complex, intelligent life, that intelligent life develops detectable (by radio telescope) evidence and that detectable signals are produced for long enough and in the right time window to be detected by us. Original estimates optimistic and arrived at a range of detectable planets in our galaxy between 1000 and 100,000,000.
However the Drake group initially assumed that 100% of habitable planets developed life and 100% of these developed intelligent life. This was based on a fairly linear view of evolution and the bias that evolution has a particular goal - to develop advanced, communicating, detectable, intelligent life. Religious folks are criticized for intelligent design, which in its most progressive form, is an evolution that is intelligently guided or directed towards a specific goal. It seems the astronomers have/had the same fallacy. When you consider that the earth is roughly 4.5B years old and that 1) to the best of our knowledge, abiogenesis (life evolving from simple organic compounds) only happened ONCE in all this time; 2) complex life (multi-cellular) has only existed for the last 1B years; 3) there have been numerous mass extinctions, any of which could have (and yet still may) wiped out all complex life on the planet; 4) intelligent life has only existed in the last 200,000 - 500,000 years; and 5) only ONE intelligent species has evolved and survived to develop a detectable civilization, it becomes clear that the evolution of life is NOT linear or directed towards a specific goal.
Different assumptions applied to the same equation yield vastly different results. If we assume that the evolution of intelligent life requires a rocky planet with a solid iron core, a molten mantel and thin tectonic crust, with just enough vulcanism to create a CO2 rich (but not too rich) atmosphere, with liquid water, orbiting a fairly young star within a habitable zone, with a magnetosphere to protect life from radiation, with several large gas giants in the outer solar system to protect the planet from bombardment by meteorites and comets, but allow just enough, early bombardment to seed the planet with water and organic compounds, with a large, near planet sized moon to allow tidal action (it is thought that life originally formed in inter-tidal zones), etc, etc, it seems very, very, very unlikely that a large proportion of habitable planets developed life at all.
I think it is quite possible, even probable, that there is life "out there", but intelligent life seems less and less probable.