Either quite bland and nothing all that special OR incredibly rare to the point of being miraculous. You won’t be surprised to learn I think it is the second option. But let’s examine why some people think it might be the first. The logic works out something like this:

1. The universe is incredibly old. 13.77 billion years (although it could be a billion years younger) so more than enough time for life to evolve in multiple places, just as it has here on Earth. And plenty of time to have colonised other planets as some on earth are planning.
2. The universe is incredibly big. But don’t trust the numbers quite yet. Just four years ago we thought the universe had as many as 1-2 trillion galaxies but recent studies show that is significantly less at around ‘hundreds of billions.’ We have a spacecraft, New Horizons which is on the edge of our solar system around 4.4 billion miles away and it just doesn’t enough light for there to be trillions. But hundreds of billions of galaxies is still a very big number. There may be more, they think but they’re so far away that their light doesn’t reach us. Which makes it almost irrelevant, I would argue.
3. Hundreds of billions of galaxies give a massive number of stars and planets, so the odds are that there is life on many of them even in our own galaxy let alone the other hundreds of billions.

Astronomical observations of distant stars tell us that many have planets orbiting them, and that some are of a size and density and orbital distance such that temperatures suitable for life are theoretically possible. It has been estimated that there are at least 2 billion such candidate planets in our galaxy alone.

Toby Tyrell, professor of Earth System Science at the University of Southampton – It’s a cosmic miracle that life on Earth’s lasted this long

This simple formula leads people to try and figure out how much other life is out there but this poses a problem, how come we have no evidence of them (or do we)? Maybe the trip is too far or too expensive or perhaps they’ve pressed their own self-destruct button. But so far the only signs of life come from just one planet, our own.

The general hope, no, expectation, that comes from physicists is that it is simply a matter of time. Which in general there is a lot of, although not necessarily for the individual scientist. Sooner or later, science will solve the mysteries of existence. We will figure out the dark matter problem, the dark energy problem and the missing antimatter problem and the faint young sun paradox and along the way we will discover life on other planets and if we’re lucky how to get there too.

Or.

Life is rare. Very rare. You need the right kind of star for a start and the right distances and combination of planets. So while Jupiter makes life on Earth possible it also made life on Venus impossible. The more criteria you have, the more complex the list of requirements then you start realising that the odds begin to change. A lot. In fact, they change so much that the odds begin to be against there being life at all.

Our planet is, they think, around 4.5 billion years old and it took around 4 billion of those years for the right conditions for complex life to emerge. But 4 billion years is an incredibly long time to stay exactly right for life to continue to evolve. There are countless things that could happen that would make life impossible.

If, for instance, an asteroid or solar flare had been slightly larger than it was, or had occurred at a slightly different (more critical) time, we would probably not be here on Earth today. It gives a different perspective on why we are able to look back on Earth’s remarkable, enormously extended, history of life evolving and diversifying and becoming ever more complex to the point that it gave rise to us.

Toby Tyrell, professor of Earth System Science at the University of Southampton – It’s a cosmic miracle that life on Earth’s lasted this long

So how lucky are we? And the answer is, very lucky indeed.

It was very rare (in fact, just one time out of 100,000) for a planet to have such strong stabilising feedbacks that it stayed habitable all 100 times, irrespective of the random climate events. In fact, most planets that stayed habitable at least once, did so fewer than ten times out of 100. On nearly every occasion in the simulation when a planet remained habitable for 3 billion years, it was partly down to luck. At the same time, luck by itself was shown to be insufficient. Planets that were specially designed to have no feedbacks at all, never stayed habitable; random walks, buffeted around by climate events, never lasted the course.

Toby Tyrell, professor of Earth System Science at the University of Southampton – It’s a cosmic miracle that life on Earth’s lasted this long

You need just the right planet at just the right distance from just the right star with just the right number of other planets and you need that planet to stay lucky for a very long time. But given there are huge numbers at play the chances are that someone got lucky and that apparently is us. But we’re luckier still because even if you have the right star, planet, combination of planetary protections and are very lucky for a very long time, it is still not inevitable that life would evolve at all, let alone complex life. The odds of that happening are just as vast.

So it seems Earth not only won the planetary lottery consistently for billions of years but organic life did too. What are the chances? No, really, what are the chances? Very, very, small.

Or quite possibly, and this should not be discounted out of hand, someone made it like this and kept it safe.