I fully expect us to find something like a bacterium somewhere else. They might even be very common anywhere where there's hydrothermal activity. Prokaryotes seem to have evolved _twice_ on earth (archaea and bacteria), albeit from some common proto-cell thing. So there's some chemiosmotic 'recipe' which can make them.

What I don't expect is anything like a eukaryote and certainly not like multicelular life. I think that kind of life is either vanishingly rare or non-existent elsewhere.

There was almost 3 billion years of life on this planet before eukaryotes arrived, and they arrived only once and in a form likely almost identical to what we see today. So it's really really 'flukey' and not something that 'just happens' in some necessary teleological fashion.

Nick Lane gets into this in his book "The Vital Question" -- it's quite convincing. And maybe depressing if you grew up on sci-fi like myself.