No, the above is not true. The universe is very vast and all that cool stuff. BUT! life started on Earth may actually be a one-off freak event. Have you heard of the fermi paradox http://www.fermisparadox.com/
Scientists have tried many times to artificially reinact the start of life, and they just can't do it. We are looking for life on Mars, because that would prove that life could occur on other planets. Most of the books that I've read state that life is some freakish occurence, a one-off basically. And then there is intelligent life, that's another book.
From what I gather, it took something like a billion years for the right molecules to come together under the right conditions to form the first single cell organisms so it's not too surprising that we've not come up with anything after only a couple of decades of work in that area. You could be right that life on earth is a freak of nature or at least extremely rare but there's nothing currently to suggest that's the more probable scenario.
Yeah, but we can artificially recreate all those molecules that started life. We can effectively jump-start the process and move it along a couple of millenium. Still getting nada. Anyways, I'm not too bothered about all that because I was just playing devil's advocate. I actually believe that there is some kind of alien life out there, just not the zooming around in spaceships type.
I actually hate the fermi-paradox, I would love it if aliens descended on us with all their lovely, different...everything!. But, this new planet that has been found in the Gleis system is apparently ahead of us by a few billion years. So where are they? Give us Earthlings a few billion years and you can bet we would have figured out some way to communicate with other planets that have been identified as Earth-like. We are already doing it with the SETI and the seti@home project, a billion years from now we will have mapped out every conceivable planet out there capable of sustaining life and would be bombarding it with all kinds of laser and radio signals.
And there must be other planet systems out there millions (or billions) older than the Gleis system, with similar Goldilock set-ups (i.e. not too cold, not too hot...just right). Where are they?
There again, the Australian arm of SETI did receive a strange burst of laser light last year......
" Fire! Fire!, Diniz in the oven" - Murray Walker on seeing Pedro Diniz's Sauber on fire