The problem with this question is that it requires us to make a lot of massive assumptions about something we know very little about.
Life as we know it probably need some very specific conditions to arise, but the issue is finding which environmental circumstances are important for life. The Moon for example may have played a big role in the origin of life but the conditions that lead Earth to having such an unusually large and massive moon are (as far as we know) rare. The same can be said for Earth's geochemistry, phosphorus is one of the most important elements in biochemistry and is relatively abundant in Earth's crust but it's also very rare in the Universe.
Those are just two examples of the many thousands criteria that may have played an important role in the origin of life on Earth and that's making the assumption that life even began here in the first place.
But life finds a way right? Maybe not. The research suggests that biochemistry of terrestrial life is simply better at making life than other hypothetical biochemistries. Speculative biology is probably the worst offender when it comes to making wild unsupported assumptions to the point where some even think that "life" could evolve on Stars. I don't want to sound dismissive but just because something is theoretically possible doesn't mean it is even on the scale of the Universe.
There's no guaranty that intelligence would arise on any given planet. Earth's history shows that life can exist for billions of years and complex life 100's millions years before anything that is comparable to Human intelligence arises or survives long enough to build civilization.
Space is big and the Universe is old but it's tiny and barely a baby compared to it's future. If life is just a numbers game then the vast majority species have yet to evolve, in fact the worlds that life starts on haven't even formed. But it's still big and old and it should be teaming with life right? The Universe changes with time and the Universe of the past was a different place that was probably less likely to produce Earth like worlds.
All it takes is one technologically advanced species, with enough time to build a galaxy spraining civilization and that's with "hard science". So where are they? Who knows, maybe they are crawling across space as we speak, maybe they don't exist yet, maybe it's our future or maybe it's just not practical to colonise space on a large (or any) scale.
Science fiction likes to speculate on a great galactic community traveling around the Universe with FTL space ships with wars, trade and all that jazz but it's probably just fiction. There's almost certainly no way to travel or communicate faster than light, every colony will have to be fully self sufficient with little to no commutation between solar systems.
