You insist we're nothing special, there's no reason to believe that.
If that were the case and there's human like intelligent life all over the place in the galaxy then we should start picking up their signals pretty soon.
Even more so, we should have picked some up already (because certainly some of them should have been ahead of us.) But we haven't found anything. We are quite possibly alone in the Milky Way in terms of intelligent life, and if we aren't, the advanced aliens are very far away indeed.
The original author went to great length to justify his arguments, I think a lot of his are flawed, but they are at least fully thought out/hashed. You cant play this thought experiment game without playing by the same rules...
You believe intelligent life is rare in the galaxy, also you believe inter galactic distances are so vast that even with mature FTL travel those regions will remain inaccessible. I dont really see a strong justification for the second postulate, the first i am on the fence about
Of course, there's no reason to assume that life on different planets is more diverse than different ponds, but it seems more likely.
But has every single pond been studied no matter its size. Do people rush to study a new discovered pond 5 meters in diameter? Is it that novel that people will rush to it? No, because there are millions of ponds just like it. That is who we are, a little pond maybe 1 meter in diameter (probably should call it a puddle), nothing extraordinary about it. There are a millions of other 1 meter ponds/puddles around the world, why would our pond/puddle be singled out? What is so special about our tiny pond/puddle? That is the point of the article. You are not thinking big enough.