Frank Heile, Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford University:
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The answer to the question is that we do not know whether there is life on other planets in our galaxy or even in the universe. The fact that there may be many habitable planets in the universe does not change the fact that we do not have any estimate of the probability that life will form on a potentially habitable planet and therefore we cannot know if there is other life in the universe.
I would LIKE to be able to say, sure, there is probably LOTS of life in our galaxy, but there really is no concrete evidence for more life, other than the life on our planet. So, we may be alone:
I used to think that since life on Earth apparently arose very soon after the formation of the Earth (within a few hundred million years), it must be true that the probability that life would arise on a possibly habitable planet must be high. However, this is not the case. To explain why, you need to know about Bayes theorem.
Bayes theorem allows you to take a "prior" probability estimate for an event along with some new evidence to arrive at a revised probability estimate for an event. So the question is, if we take the "new evidence" to be the existence of the one case of the earth, where life arose early, can we conclude that the probability for life to arise on a potentially habitable planet is significantly above zero? The answer is that the revised probability is dominated by the prior probability estimate that we use. So, if we were to assume that the prior probability was 10−50, the revised probability would be close to 10−50. Whereas if we assume the prior probability was 0.1 the revised probability would be close to 0.1. If the probability was 10−50 then we would probably be the only planet with life on it in the entire universe. If the probability were 0.1 there would be MANY planets with life on them in our galaxy.
This is demonstrated in full detail in a 2011 paper on the arXiv

Page on Arxiv). This paper showed that with only our one example of life arising on Earth (us), the proper application of Bayes theorem would find that the revised probability estimate is totally dominated by the probability you wildly guessed as the prior probability of life arising.
Therefore there really is no meaningful estimated probability for the development of life on a planet even though you do have one example of the event you are trying to get an estimate for (all you can conclude is that the probability is NOT 0). However, if we could find just 1 additional independent example of life arising on a planet, then we really could show that the probability is "high" that life begins early in a habitable planet and that result would be somewhat insensitive to the prior probability assumption.
Short of having evidence for at least one other independent origination of life on another planet, we could have confidence that life is common in the universe if we had a theory and really understood the exact way that abiogenisis happened on earth. Once life started, the theory of evolution makes it clear that life will likely continue for a long time on a planet.
But we really do not have any good theory for the steps that were taken that transformed amino acids and other hydrocarbon compounds into the first living cell in the early earth environment. Even the simplest living cells today are far too complicated to have formed by chance. There must have been multiple intermediate steps between a hydrocarbon soup to the first living cell but we really don't know what those steps were and how likely they would be to happen within the first few hundred million years on the earth. Research in this area could give us confidence that life is common but we have not had the needed breakthroughs and insights yet.
So, even with the evidence of life on earth, there really is no definite evidence of other life in our galaxy or even in the universe. So until we find one other independent example of life arising somewhere else, we really cannot estimate the probability of life in the galaxy or universe."