I'm late to respond to your comment, but I qualified my statement with a reference to how we commonly refer to intelligence. Speculating about what's in the uni

I'm late to respond to your comment, but I qualified my statement with a reference to how we commonly refer to intelligence. Speculating about what's in the universe while ignoring what data we have is fooling, imo. There are an estimated 8.7 million species on earth. The common interpretation of intelligence puts the ratio of intelligent-to-non-intelligent species we know of at about 1:8,700,000. Nothing I've seen in the literature on evolution suggests that evolution will lead to intelligence under than definition. Mammals led to humans, and only after the dinosaurs were wiped out by a mass extinction event. So while I can't say for sure that intelligent life is more or less common at a universal scale, it makes far more sense to assume the rest of the universe and the mechanics of evolution are consistent with what we see on Earth. I don't think we'd be that unique in the cosmos, which seems to me to be an egotistical thing to think, anyway.