Nothing new

From "Walking on the Rings of Saturn," the final profile in Paul Collins excellent book of "people who didn't change the world," Banvard's Folly:

To [18th century Scottish astronomer Thomas] Dick, the massive workings of the skies were a means to a magnificent and inscrutable end. For it to be otherwise, a means without an end, would reveal our Maker to be a cruel existentialist. The universe would be, as his book The Sidereal Heavens claims, "one wide scene of dreariness, desolation, horror, and silence, which would fill a spectator from this world with terror and dismay ... without one sentient being to cheer the horrors of the scene." This was clearly unacceptable in a Christian god, as was the "wild hallucination" that our own life was an accident of primordial chemistry. We did not exist as a result of fortunate material reactions--it existed to please us, a conceit now known as the Anthropic Principle. "Matter," Dick insisted, "was evidently framed for the purpose of mind."

It also followed that having matter anywhere without a sentient being for it to serve would be pointless. Therefore every celestial body must be inhabited. Intelligent life was more than a mere accident of our planet, or of perhaps one or two others: it was the natural state of the universe. To believe otherwise was "impious, blasphemous, and absurd." Writing like Celestial Scenery are thunderous on this point: "Let us suppose for a moment that the vast regions on the surfaces of the planets are only immense and frightful desires, devoid of inhabitants--wherein does the wisdom of the Creator appear in the supposition? Would this be an end worthy of infinite wisdom?"

Thomas Dick eventually used his theory to prove life on the moon (specifically 4.2 billion lives).