There was recent news from NASA about the discovery of organic molecules on Mars and the possibility of life there at some point in the past. Discovery that life once existed on Mars would blow up the assumptions in the Drake equation.
As for the Fermi paradox I'm still of the opinion that its solution is simple but depressing: Interstellar travel is so difficult that by the time you're capable of it you don't need it anymore, and even when you're capable of it you still don't get very far outside of your stellar neighborhood. Unlimited power systems, reactionless drives, and FTL travel (or even high-c travel) are depressingly impossible. And then the cold hand of entropy and the aggregate chance of disaster make it extremely dangerous to even attempt. Basically without Sci-Fi propulsion/power you end up traveling at an interstellar snail's pace, and the longer the trip the more likely it is that a random meteorite smashes through your vessel, or you simply run out of spare parts and materials to make them, and the amount of fuel you need to just keep the lights on becomes enormous.
If you can build a starship that can travel between solar systems with our current understanding of physics, then you can build orbital colonies for basically unlimited living space much much easier. For one, they can be powered by solar cells instead of needing to carry fuel. It's not like we are going to run out of raw materials either. Even restricting yourself to the belt the amount of material available would last basically indefinitely. Worst case you can start breaking up moons.
So even in a universe full of life everybody is alone. Especially if you think about how genetic algorithms tend to get hung up on local maxima, so lots of planets waste millions of years with dumb dinosaurs with no space program or radio telescopes.