The cosmological-constant problem is usually posed as a numerical mismatch between the observed late-time acceleration of the universe and a formally enormous bulk vacuum-energy density obtained by summing zero-point modes in effective field theory. We propose a different starting point: in the Directed Acyclic Graph Interpretation (DAGI), the physically relevant gravitating source is not a bulk vacuum density but a renormalized screen-supported remainder associated with irreversible records and higher-order informational constraints on causal screens. Within this framework, we show that once the common kinematic background is separated, lower-order screen perturbations cannot regenerate the leading bulk heat-kernel coefficient, so the quartic bulk catastrophe is not part of the physical source sector. In exact Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) symmetry, the renormalized screen sector reduces to a scalar Hubble-screen Fredholm problem, yielding a late-time effective source branch that is naturally parameterized by a positive future floor E∞, the corresponding asymptotic Hubble scale H∞, and an effective present-day equation of state w0eff. We then connect this branch to the public-data cosmology stack using Type Ia supernovae (Pantheon+, Union3, DES-SN5YR/Dovekie), baryon acoustic oscillations (DESI DR2), cosmic chronometers, and compressed CMB distance priors (Planck 2018). On the microscopic side, we show how the same branch is reproduced by a screen-cut ladder derived from the DAGI emergent-spacetime-geometry (ESG) program through a half-density Fredholm representation, a fixed-weight geometric productive factor, and an independently calibrated weak-field coupling. The resulting source replacement is therefore both theoretically structured and empirically testable. The scope of the present paper is limited to a late-time effective branch and its microscopic bridge; ultraviolet completion, perturbation theory, and inflationary phenomenology are left to separate work.
Petr Sramek (2026) studied this question.