There’s a good chance that there are many planets with all kinds of life, but interstellar transit is a practical impossibility. If you believe in a creator you have to wonder why he would make such a huge universe and only fill one tiny part of it with life.
I agree with you. Life on Earth is so prolific, exuberant, irrepressible - even extremophiles living in conditions that we wouldn’t have thought anything could, until relatively recently. We might even have kinds of life - and possibly intelligent ones - living here beside us that we simply don’t ‘see’ for what they are.
I don’t think that the Mind that gave rise to life on Earth stopped there; or that It ever stops creating.