Drake estimates that there are some 10,000 communicative civilisations scattered across the Milky Way. It's not a religion or a cult. It's not a way of directly detecting intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. She bristles at those who dismiss the effort as less scientifically worthy than studying galaxies or planets. I can't contest that probability from a biological viewpoint.
Intelligence is surely a specialisation, a highly adaptive specialisation.
On Earth, life arose quickly-3.6 or 3.8 billion years ago. This suggests that life might get started easily. More than 50 gigabytes of data are gathered each day. Since there is not an Internet connection large enough to transmit that data from Puerto Rico, it is sent on tape to the lab in Berkeley. Faced with 50 terabytes of data to analyse, the project takes help from the public.