> Life is probably abundant everywhere in the universe.
I'm not convinced of that. Yes it seems like the building blocks are abundant but there's so many steps beyond that to get to abundant life.
The first life we had in the Archeaen era was dependant on sulfur, which was concentrated around volcanic vents so this already presumes a lot, namely oceans and a geologically active planet. Oxygen leeched a bunch of minerals into the water.
And then came cyanobacteria who no longer needed volcano but had this annoying habit of producing a new waste product: oxygen. This both absolutely killed all the Archeaen life but also cleansed the oceans as ions like iron precipitated into ferric oxide and we can see the layers of these cycles in the rock.
So the Earth needed all these elements and the Sun and Solar System needed to be sufficiently stable for billions of years just to get to this point and there are so many steps beyond this.
I personally believe it's more likely than not that we are the only potentially spacefaring civilization in our entire galaxy.
This all hinges on the presupposition that our solar system is unique in its configuration and location in the galaxy.
We haven't surveyed nearly enough other planetary systems to have any real idea if our system is unique. We barely have the ability to even see systems like ours in the first place. There's so little data available that it's not reasonable to draw a conclusion either way.