It’s not faith, just an evaluation based on the recent discoveries that conditions are good for some form of life to develop in our solar system. I can only hope to live long enough to witness that if it does occur. I think the biggest obstacle to discovering life is our commitment to seek it out, not the improbability that it could exist elsewhere.
It's not "faith", but Copernican inference. We have discovered, successively, that the Earth is not the center of the universe; nor is the Sun; nor is our galaxy; nor is the time we live in. Each finding of "we're not special" improves the possibility that life, and perhaps intelligence itself, is not special in the universe. So why, given this, are we not seeing evidence for it? (Fermi's Paradox)
Perhaps we are like inhabitants of a small island in the Pacific, speculating whether intelligent life exists anywhere else on Earth. So every morning the wise man of the village goes down to to the beach to look for a message in a bottle...