It's not bad science, though, because it's not science. It's not meant to be science. All Drake set out to do was establish an agenda for an NAS meeting in 1961

It's not bad science, though, because it's not science. It's not meant to be science. All Drake set out to do was establish an agenda for an NAS meeting in 1961 regarding extraterrestrial intelligence. It's a list of known unknowns. It was not arrived at via scientific experimentation, and was never claimed to have, so anyone calling it "science", even "bad science", is mislabeling it.