There are approximately 200 billion trillion stars in the universe. Or, to put it another way, 200 sextillion

The burden of proof is on you to prove there is life on at least one other planet

We don't know how to correctly assess the parameters in Drake's equation, so your conclusion is pure speculation. All we need is for one of the parameters to be really low -- either because of a single factor or a combination of many factors -- and we're alone forever.

A strong position of denial would also come with a similar burden of proof, since it's known what kind of conditions are necessary for life to emerge and it's also known that there are a shit ton of suitable planets out there.

The purpose of Drake's equation was to try to put a figure on the number of extraterrestrial, intelligent civilisations in the Milky Way at the current time, in order to get an idea as to whether their radio transmissions might be observable.

OP's question was "Earth is the only planet with life". Whatever Drake's equation might tell us, you can massively ramp up the resulting number if you multiply the figure by the number of galaxies and take into account that life does not have to evolve to be intelligent.

Not how it works. We've spent about 70 years actively scanning the sky for life, and we've found nothing. We see no evidence of signals or megastructures. As far as we can tell, we're alone. And we have no good reason to assume otherwise, because we DON'T have a good idea of what conditions are necessary for life to emerge. We just know that it did, once.

I think it's quite plausible we're alone in the universe. The conditions to bring together amino acids that form self-replicating strands may have only happened once.

>And some people still dare to claim that Earth is the only planet with life.

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They've seen Earth and they know nothing would be gained from contacting it

the fact that we even exist is proof that intelligent life forms came here in the past, did a bunch of genetic experiments that created us, and then left/died (or maybe they're still here hiding/blending in, spooky). natural selection can explain the evolution of every species on earth except us. our DNA is all the evidence we should need, we clearly don't belong here like the other life on earth. we're hybrids made of partially ape and partially alien genes. it just take an incredibly high level of ingenuity and large amounts of energy to travel the vast distances between habitable planets, so i'd guess that it happens only on rare occasions. maybe we'll get there some day if we stop fucking around.

I took that into account. That's the flaw in your assumption -- you're assuming if we can increase the factors to some really large number -- say 100 septillion planets in the universe -- then that means that life is likely.

No, that's not the case if the chances of life occurring are low enough. And we simply don't know. We've made some guesses about primordial soup, the emergence of RNA, and of cell membranes. But we simply don't know how it happened. The chances might be incredibly low.

>We've spent about 70 years actively scanning the sky for life, and we've found nothing.
Apparently you've no idea how limited those methods are and how fast signals degrade over distances of great many lightyears.
The planets they see far away are only noticeable if their orbits happen to align with the star and the observer so that they momentary make the star's observed light a tiny bit dimmer.
To think that looking at the sky like that would ever give you any concrete sign of life is just laughable.

Not to mention that we've got the right sun to give us life, the correct distance away from it, the correct make-up of our planet, the tilt of the axis for seasons, a sizable moon to take a lot of impact from space debris, not one but two huge planets to draw a lot of debris away from us plus man other variables.

I'm not saying conclusively there is no life elsewhere. I'm just saying that there are a whole lot of factors which had to be just right for life to evolve on this planet.

I am quite aware how limited those methods are. Just because you have a limited imagination, don't project it on me.

But we also can make some guesses about the rise in energy consumption, and the effects a K2 or K3 civilization would have -- we'd see dark patches as stars and entire galaxies vanish as their energy is captured by Dyson swarms.

Except we see nothing like that. The distribution of the universe above the level of the supercluster seems to be almost totally uniform. We could make some guesses about dark energy or dark matter, but we really have no grasp on that yet. And we might find something in the Bootes Void or the like, but still we'd expect to see more infrared (waste heat).

And yet we see nothing. Which isn't that implausible, because it's a young universe. Red dwarf stars will last trillions of years, and we're only 13.8 billion years in, and it's only been a couple billion years since the supernovas created enough heavier elements. We might be the first, or at least the local first, which is the same thing -- because with expansion and the speed of light, most of the universe is inaccessible anyway.