It's an inevitability that there's life somewhere out there. The Drake Equation confirms it, but more importantly, we must remember that in a universe of billions of known galaxies, each with trillions of stars, common sense dictates that we are not alone. Hell, we've barely even tapped into the knowledge our own solar system holds. More than likely, one of Saturn's moons or Jupiter's moons holds life of some sort (all it takes is one little bacteria to be discovered to confirm it).
We should turn our attention to moons like Ganymede, Titan, Europa, and Io before we start thinking about life in our galaxy... and life beyond our galaxy.
Perhaps Lovecraft summed it up best when he wrote (in "The Call of Cthulhu"):
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
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