Well, there are plenty of planets out there that can support intelligent life. Going from no life to life is incredibly difficult, the chances are very small. But given an abundance of planets and 14 billion years of time there should be some intelligent life out there.

What does it mean if we find no intelligent life? According to this bloke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aspMV6ERqpo it is bad news because there may well have been intelligent life but at a certain stage of advanced development something wipes it out wherever it is. We may yet be short of being so advanced as to be detected by this something that wipes out advanced intelligent life. This filter is in our future. So actually finding very advanced intelligent life would be good news, proving this filtering out theory wrong and we have a future. Well, it would not actually prove the filter theory wrong but at least prove that the filter is in the long term future and give us hope that the filter theory is wrong. In fact the more advanced that such intelligent life is, the better news it is because we have the possibility of ourselves at least reaching the advanced level of the life that we find, before the filter kicks in if it ever does.