I think it's really important to distinguish between "intelligent life" and just "life", because these are two vastly different questions.

Life is, I think, going to be everywhere. I think we'll find evidence of it on Mars, I think it might well be in the clouds of Venus (surprisingly good place for life to evolve, actually) and it's almost certainly below the ice on Europa, I'd bet a considerable sum on that. As for outside of the solar system,. then it's just math, we can be fairly certain there's life "somewhere", if not in the Milky Way, which is a lot of stars, then certainly in other galaxies, which represent orders of magnitude more stars.

But intelligent life? That might be really rare. Just look at how smart we are, compared to the next smartest creates (Corvids, dolphins, elephants, ants); it's not even close, their best tool is a stick and we have robots on Mars. We're so much smarter than anything else in nature.

Our intelligence is an aberration, and honestly represents as great a leap forward mentally as "wings" did for insects or "breathing air" did for fish / amphibians. It's a giant leap, and it might be statistically unlikely enough that we're alone in the Milky Way. It'd be silly to posit we're alone in the universe, no matter the odds, there's too many chances for something comparable to us not to exist somewhere else, but we might genuinely be alone in our galaxy, which as far as observation / communication / travel might as well be everything there is, we're never going to Andromeda, that's not going to be a thing.