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@djsumdog
>So will human beings ever be able to verify life elsewhere?
Only if we find something on Mars or moons of Jupiter/Saturn. Will we actually? Very small chances, but at the same time, it's the best bet. Recently it was discovered that Mars might actually still have a liquid ocean of sorts, but deep deep underground, on the order of tens of miles. Deeper than we've been able to dig on Earth. So there could be something, but how do we verify it? I expect that the more we keep looking, we'll discover more biomolecules, aminoacids, simple proteins, we'll discover every major building block of life on Mars, Europa, Enceladus, but we won't come face to face with animal life, and if there's bacterial life on these bodies, it could be many decades before we'll find it and even more to be sure it wasn't a false detection because of contamination.
For Europa and Enceladus we might know something by the end of our lifetimes, as there are ideas on how you could melt through the ice and reach the ocean. For Mars though... we might never know for sure, cause I don't see humanity committing to dig down far enough.

Star Trek-like interstellar travel is not gonna happen. I personally think something like that is impossible. For traditional rocket power, you'd need a generational ark to go outside the solar system, and the range will be limited. The odds of finding anything in our immediate vicinity is basically null. We've used telescopes to study our immediate vicinity, and can't even find atmospheres that are clearly life altered (like having a high quantity of oxygen).

If I assume human life will go on indefinitely, I do think at some point we'll find a radio signal that we won't be able to explain, that will look artificial, that will look as if it could be carrying information. But I don't think we'll be able to decode it, and it won't have a societal impact as large as people would like to think such a discovery will have. But something like this could literally be millions of years into the future, and remember, any signal we might hear, would be from a civilization that might have even gone extinct by the time it reached us. If I limit myself within our lifetimes... I don't think so.

>Is life so rare that the planets who have developed it may never find us?
Yes. But more importantly, I think advanced intelligent life is what is incredibly rare. If there are even a handful of civilizations within our galaxy that are at about our level of development, I'd consider that a miracle. And I wouldn't be surprised if we are the only thinking beings in our galaxy right now.
Life could very well be inevitable if you get a planet with the right conditions. But I see no obvious reason why life would have a preference for evolving high intelligence. I consider humanity a fluke. A cosmic mistake of sorts. An anomaly. An interesting one, but no matter how much statistics someone throws at me (but there are so many stars, and so many planets, and even if only 1% bla bla bla) it's not convincing me that it is a repeatable anomaly. I need a valid argument for why in a different ecosystem a high intelligence would be something evolution eventually selects for. If intelligence was important for evolution, I'd expect the Silurian hypothesis to have some evidence behind it.