Interview this weekend with Britain's first astronaut / cosmonaut

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jan/05/astronaut-helen-sharman-this-much-i-know

Aliens exist, there’s no two ways about it. There are so many billions of stars out there in the universe that there must be all sorts of different forms of life. Will they be like you and me, made up of carbon and nitrogen? Maybe not. It’s possible they’re here right now and we simply can’t see them.

Not necessarily. It could be that life is inexplicably rare, in which case it almost certainly has never happened before Earth and will never happen again.

This will depend heavily on abiogenesis research and SETI to verify.

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Philosophies:

• Intuitionist
  
• Moral functionalist
  
• Humean about motivations
  
• Panpsychist leaning; optimistic about combination problem
  
• Agnostic; sympathetic to prime movers
  

I'm with Keith on the optimism (or I wouldn't be contributing to this project) but have to agree with Rayalot72 on the realism. In terms of life, we are still dealing with a sample size of one...

I think it's fair to say that the vastness of the universe (or even our own galaxy) is legitimate reason to explore the possibility of life, but certainly isn't enough to conclude its inevitability.