Again, I disagree. Drake at least thought about the problem long enough to get the scientific community to consider his equation. At least that's a starting point for discussion and he deserves to be lauded for it.
That is materialistic assumption not warranted by the existing data.
Not sure what you are arguing here: That the universe is 13.4 billion years old or that signals from the far side could take billions of years to get here. From what I've read, the scientific community agrees on the age of the universe. Given the Earth is a little over 4 billion years old, it seems reasonable to be to assume that other galaxies in the universe are older than the Milky Way, leaving about a 9 billion year window for some other civilization to be more advanced than we are. However, assuming the speed of light is fixed (at least past the point of Singularity), it could take billions of years to get a signal from one of these "early" galaxies.
SETI is NOT science if you are attempting to be an honest evolutionist. Which is it for you?