Right now aliens could be seeing Earth’s dinosaurs—our radio hello won’t reach them for 1,000 years—per the Drake Equation. Planets are everywhere—200–400B stars and tens of billions of Goldilocks worlds—but after 60+ years we’ve heard nothing beyond a 72‑second Wow signal, and our radio bubble is only ~100 light‑years (0.1% of the Milky Way). So JWST is sniffing exoplanet air for oxygen+methane and even industrial pollutants, while the Great Filter hangs over the real variable: can tech civilizations last centuries or millions of years?