Seriously, FWIW, it seems likely to me that we are "among the first". It makes us special, but not in a really rewarding way that would support any egotism about it; it was a crap shoot, blind 'luck', -- so what? In the end, it does not seem likely that we'll be around to see the eventual swelling up of our sol, because even if our descendants are around they won't be us (though whoever is around will certainly have want of the ability to get off the earth, eh?). The insular Chinese (mentioned in other comments above) would probably have started exploring again -- and with great gusto -- had their known world looked to become inhospitable to life.

it is as though this universe was designed to support Human life.

Typical human arrogance! There are plenty of other life forms on the planet and most of them have been around a lot longer than we have. Also, apart from this 'Pale Blue Dot', the rest of the Universe doesn't appear to be very conducive to humans or anything else without some form of life support system.

Plus, do we even WANT to know. We can not even get along with our own species. What makes us think that bringing in a new one with much more advanced technologies is going to make it better??? I HOPE we don't find other civilizations with technologies that we don't understand. We can not control what we have now. Lets learn to observe before we start running toward a path we don't know it leads to.

And, of course, there's the hypothesis that intelligent life may be relatively common, but that it invariably causes its own extinction, whether by nuclear holocaust, by nanotech gray goo, or by some other technological catastrophe which has to do with a device which we've yet to envision.

These are more like interesting plot devices for SF stories than serious hypotheses, but they sure are fun to ponder.

Also, it seems unlikely that the "light-speed problem" will ever be solved, which makes the whole colonization problem pretty insurmountable. Hundreds of years in hostile environments where if anything goes wrong, everyone dies (i.e., a space flight to a nearby planet)? Humans can't even muster up the enthusiasm for a 2 year trip to Mars. Exploring space with space probes seems like the only possible way to proceed, and even then, the timescales are such that there are no short-term gains. And engineering a probe that can harvest raw materials and self-replicate? That seems apocalyptically dangerous, even if it may be plausible to imagine. Maybe the "dark matter" providing so much gravity for the universe is a self-replicating probe gone horribly wrong.

You can see there is a massive gap where there is no 'intelligent' life. It also seems that are civilisation rests upon the brief stable climate and only within this window of stable temperatures could an agricultural revolution take place, and civilization begin. Of course different types of civilizations could form on other planets, but I think there are a lot of obstacles to the development of an advanced species that can communicate across the universe or galaxy.