So send the yeast.
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On the other, the early universe — this particular "warm bath" era — had approximately zero oxygen with which to make water. Right temperature, just (IIRC, but I'm not certain) zero stars yet, so nothing to make things heavier than what came out of Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
IMHO, "We don't know" is the only answer to the question of how many planets have life on them or the probability of some forms of live existing somewhere. 0 is as valid as 10^128 until more than one other life supporting planet or moon is found to establish some baseline for speculation. otherwise, we're talking sci-fi here, in which case I think stargate's version seems decent.
That's all.
We could call it "The beer at the end of the universe"
It seems unlikely to be possible to completely prevent all lifeforms from hitching a ride
In a way, it's a tragedy that human civilization has only emerged at a time when both Mars and Venus have become much more uninhabitable than they used to be.
I'm fully with you that the sheer number of planets is one of, if not the most powerful data point we know for sure, that points toward the plausibility of extraterrestrial life. One thing I haven't heard discussed a whole lot though is, what if it's a tug of war, between a preposterously large number of planets, and a correspondingly preposterously small chance of life, that is every bit as impressively small as the number of planets is impressively big?
For whatever reason, it seems like the default attitude is to treat the sheer volume of planets like they more than compensate for the rarity of life. But what it doesn't work like that? There are different versions of this argument that apply to any life at all, and then to intelligent life, so take your pick for the more interesting question.
But in principle it seems like life, and especially multicellular and even more especially intelligent life, very well could be kind of vanishingly rare that's effectively a match in rareness to the universe's vastness.
[1] Though maybe it does speak to life tending toward evolving more complex, energy consuming systems, and its propensity to spread out into the universe.
I heard an interesting speculative talk about why we should be putting hard microbes on every planet and moon in our solar system because we'll probably cause an extinction event and perhaps the other celestial body could get a head start on evolving a better form of intelligence.