As someone who used to believe in the Saganite philosophy of millions of Earthlike planets, I too have moved to a more pessimistic view of any other complex life forms (animals, plants) in the galaxy. I'm beginning to wonder if even life itself is not highly improbable, as is the view of many non space cadet biologists. The nice thing about that doubt is that we may have an answer in the next 30 years assuming we fly a TPF capable of detecting active biological activity in exo-Earth atmospheres. Kepler will give us baseline statistics on the prevalance of planets in stellar HZs so that we will have an idea for TPF of how many LYs out we'll need to search to have a decent chance of spectroscopic analysis of potential exo-Earths.

As someone around as a child when the Space Age started, I am astounded that over 50 years later we still haven't a clue if there is anything at all living elsewhere. That was certainly not the expectation 50 yrs foreward at the time with all the probes to Mars, SETI, etc. Maybe the next generation will at the very least answer the basic question of microbial life's existance elsewhere.