the thing is that our specific kind of life-bearing planet may very well be a rarity; we're within the Goldilocks zone of a medium-size yellow star (an estimated 75% of stars in the Milky Way galaxy are red dwarfs), and yes, without the Theia event, it's very likely that complex life would never have developed on Earth, because not only does Luna help by keeping the oceans moving and thus causing life-facilitating elements and compounds circulating, but the impact also set the Earth's core spinning and generating a magnetosphere that protects us from solar winds and radiation; Mars's atmosphere of about 0.01 bars and its aridity are partly because it doesn't have these protections
it may be that large satellites of gas giants might be the "safest" place for life to develop, staying warm through tidal heating and protecting the liquid ocean beneath a thick layer of ice; the best places to find life elsewhere in the solar system might very well be Europa, for example, or even in parts of Jupiter's atmosphere
the other thing is that life is probably common in the universe, because we've actually demonstrated in a laboratory that if you just put a bunch of the right elements in water and pump energy into it, you get proteins forming, and four specific nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine) are the building blocks of RNA and DNA
not only that, but we've found, like, free-floating clouds of amino acids in deep space
it's improbable to the point of being indistinguishable from impossible that we're the only intelligent life in the universe, and although we might be the only intelligent life in our home star system, it's quite probable that there's life elsewhere here, just not in a place we can easily see it
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