Even today still get that feeling when it comes to the topic of liquid water, where people will point at the lack of meaningful atmospheres and declare places like Mars or any other body holding ices as too different to not be dry, when you just need the right ground temperature gradient and some trapped ice.
Wikipedia has a list of other chemistries that could maybe support life, but we don't know if they do in the universe or not. We know that the basics of life on earth (water, carbon) are very common in the universe, and so there is no reason to think that life as we know it should be rare - but we also have no evidence of life elsewhere (mostly because we don't even have the ability to see evidence if it exists - the universe is large and we can't detect the important things even a few light years away)
Maybe we're the first/only civilization in the galaxy. If so, then the question is, why? Maybe we're just the first and there will soon be millions of other civilizations.
But most likely, Earth is a fluke. Either something in its environment made it conducive to civilization or some random (and rare) evolutionary path led to civilization.
My uneducated guess is that microbial life is relatively common, but multi-cellular life is very rare and technological life is unique (at least in our galaxy).