We know there is life in the universe (on our planet), there is empirical proof of that. So the question now is whether there is also life on other planets. If

We know there is life in the universe (on our planet), there is empirical proof of that. So the question now is whether there is also life on other planets. If you don't think there is life on other planets then you must think our planet is somehow special / extraordinary among all others. However, given the cosmological principle, then the more planets there is, the harder it must be to justify that our planet is special. The fact that there is an unthinkably huge number of planets in the universe seems to make that extremely unlikely. The GP dismisses statistical arguments in favor of empirical evidence, but much of what we accept about physics or the universe is the result of statistical processes. Since our universe is stochastic, strictly speaking we never really know anything for certain, we just deem something is accepted as true when it reaches an arbitrary statistical threshold. Also, just because you don't sense something directly it doesn't mean that you can't infer that it exists based on statistical arguments alone. For example, when estimating the number of species on Earth, there is no evidence that there are more species than the ones we already discovered, but we infer there are because we are discovering new species all the time, which means it's extremely unlikely we have discovered them all already. The cosmological principle itself is a statistical argument more than anything... there is no proof that Earth isn't at the center of the (entire) universe, but almost nobody thinks that nowadays. Note that in this thread we are only discussing whether there is life somewhere else in the universe, not whether there's alien life on earth right now, which obviously is harder to justify.