Chances are that there are many billions of planets with intelligent life in our universe. Chances are that we will never discover each other because of the vast distances between us and the fact that the light barrier will probably never be broken, making any interstellar expeditions very difficult.
But what do I know? A hundred years ago, nobody could conceive the kind of high-tech world we live in today.
I predict that tax freedom day will be on December 31st. Seriously, the discovery of quantum mechanics was the biggest influence over the last 100. But I think today we have better visiblity into the future. Even so, I hope there will be more surprises and breakthroughs that will shape the next 100 years. And then there will be evil people who try to use it to their advantage, and somebody will have to do the dirty work of defeating them as we are doing today.
In my opinion, you are completely wrong. 99% of the stars in the milky way are unsuitable because they are too big and unstable, in binary systems (no viable planetary orbits), too small (not enough energy), or in a crowded area of the galaxy where planetary catastrophes happen regularily or in a too sparsely dusted area (no iron cores).
Next you need a very rare colision to form an earth moon system. The earth-moon system is more like a spinning dumbell which is a very stable configuration. Most other planets are more like spinning tops which leads to massive climate changes. Also a lot of the earth's crust went into the moon which made for plate techtonics on earth which is necessary for the carbon cycle (creature die and go to the sea floor, then the sea floor goes underneath and the carbon gets spit back up by volcanoes). Next you need all planets to have circular orbits, a very rare circumstance. You need a lot of water for climate stability, but not so much there is no dry land. You probably need tide pools for nutrients to accumulate and not be dispersed in the ocean and that means a very unusual moon (most moons are tiny compared to the planets they orbit). You may need some luck or divine intervention to for a human mind. Dinosaurs had about 300 million years to develope technology, and they just did not have it in them. You need a molten core and a strong magnetic field. No field means the star's solar wind full of protons slowly boils away the atmosphere. My guess is that we are very close to being unique in the milky way. There are billions of galaxies, but earth is very rare.
But what if speed is only relative to where you are physically at which would mean there is no limit to speed since you are actually standing still in your spaceship?
As our telescopes become more powerful, we will discover many more planets. There are billions of planets to be found in our galaxy alone. And our galaxy is only a normal size galaxy in a constellation of millions of other galaxies. And our constellation is only an average constellation in a universe of billions of constellations.There are some here in FR who will continue to grasp at straws, hoping against hope (though I can't imagine why) that those discoveries never come.
But they will come. As sure as Bush is going to win this election, we'll find earthlike planets in the sky someday. In fact, even more sure than that.