There's life and then there's intelligent life.
I'm sure life is out there somewhere. Might even be in other parts of our solar system, completely undetected.
Intelligent life, on the other hand, may not be so easy to come by. For starters, intelligent life requires a certain level of sophistication in the life form. I.e., you can't have intelligent life without a certain level of complexity. Even something as "dumb" as a roundworm is incredibly complex.
Complexity requires stability. Imagine being bombarded by quasars and blasted by supernova. Life is very possible in that environment, but it would be equally difficult for any life form to organize into something more complex than bits of matter capable of replication.
However, on the flip side, life itself requires energy, and energy density. That is, the larger the life form, the greater the energy is necessary to sustain it. Not to mention, energy density is needed for the life form to do complex things. In the most extreme of such cases (humans post-industrial revolution), several billion years of stored energy is necessary to get one sentient creature into a position where it can send information into space. But even in the simple cases, a certain energy density is needed just to maintain the complexity that was built up. Note the number of extinctions before post-industrial revolution humans walked the Earth. Without the necessary energy density, complex life would never recover from each extinction event, instead become less complex over time.
So intelligent life requires a balance of energy (chaos) and stability (order). Which means, based on entropy, that the density of life in the universe over time probably resembles a bell curve. We humans are chronologically located at a spot where the curve has risen above the complexity threshold.
I personally believe (well, calculated based on some estimations) the universe itself is entering the rising portion of the bell curve (entering in the geological timescale sense), where life on Earth is more or less among the first waves of complex life. Which is why we're finding little to nothing out there. As two billion years worth of stored energy is needed to just get us to the moon, and not very many other planets would have had two billion years worth of time to do both store energy and develop complex life, life as complex as us is probably very, very rare at the moment. But, as we're just entering the golden age, in some billions of years, we'll probably see more and more intelligent creatures out there. That will last until the bell curve starts curving downwards, likely in several hundreds of billions of years where energy density has gotten too low for complex life to grow intelligent, which will last for multiple billion years until the universe simply doesn't have enough energy to sustain life itself. But that's probably on a multi-trillion-year timescale.
And on a similar, more depressing vein, whatever life comes after humans on Earth, it will likely be hundreds of millions of years, if not billions of years before there's enough energy for that organism to go through a similar industrial revolution and arrive in space. So for Earth (which probably will no longer be hospitable by that time), we're probably as advanced an organism as the planet will ever see.