I agree it’s an open question, but I think it’s highly likely with lots of circumstantial evidence that life is an evolutionary emergent phenomenon where inorganic material reactions create life. We already know that’s the case in highly controlled environments. We don’t yet have confidence about the exact mechanism on Earth but based on those experiments it’s likely (& generally currently accepted as the most likely mechanism AFAIK) that the boundary layer of volcanoes (probably underwater) + some crucial initial elements being available causes life to form “spontaneously”. Given the elements required and their overall availability in the universe, it’s also highly likely these conditions reproduce quite readily & life is generally quite abundant. Similarly, significant levels of intelligence within animals seems like quite a common occurrence as well (great and lesser apes, elephants, octopuses, dolphins, wolves etc). Whether or not intelligence + physiological evolution + social evolution to take advantage of that intelligence to build things cooperatively is a huge unknown of course although I think it’s inevitable. On the other hand, how long life sticks around on a planet once it forms is an open question - it’s not clear if a life ecosystem that’s stable for billions of years is likely and I suspect there’s probably a small amount of filtering that happens where planets become inhospitable rather “quickly” and can’t support life for multiple billions of years (e.g. there were probably several events in our history where it could have collapsed).
Our type of society is probably much much rarer because you need access to mineral and energy deposits to go through each technological phase. For example, because of all the mining we’ve done, if humanity were to disappear it’s highly likely the Earth would not sustain another technological society because all the “easy to get to” deposits of crucial metals & things like oil are gone and there’s no way to bootstrap a technological society (it’s possible other kinds of resources could be developed to build other kinds of technology so who knows).
I think based on our existing body of knowledge, life is likely extremely plentiful throughout the universe at one point in time or another. Some form of intelligent life is highly likely wherever we find any life that manages to stick around through bilions of years. A highly technological adept species of life though is highly likely an extreme rarity and a planet gets one shot at developing it. Whether any manages to escape their home planet remains an open question that likely only we will manage to answer over the next thousands of years if we make it that far.