The Stochastic Incubator Hypothesis: Model Collapse as a Motive for Non-Contact in the Fermi Paradox

The Fermi paradox asks why a galaxy billions of years old shows no sign of other civilizations. Zoo-type hypotheses, in which advanced civilizations observe young worlds without contacting them, rarely give the observers a motive and seem to require that every civilization obeys the same rule. The Stochastic Incubator Hypothesis addresses both. Its motive rests on a structural principle that current artificial intelligence makes observable: points of view issuing from a single source inherit its blind spots, as model collapse and correlated errors between models show. An ancient intelligence that has hit this “wall” would gain from letting independent minds arise, and from not contaminating them. No policing is required: the silence is attributed to the rarity of technological life, the diversity of civilizations' natures and the same wall, which brakes expansions from within; the non-contact rule explains only why those who exist do not speak to us. A Monte Carlo model makes the observed silence probable (0.88 across draws), verifies the hypothesis's Drake-like equation against the simulation, and finds that interlocutors compatible with the silence, admitted civilizations that remain independent sources of thought, would be very rare, about one per galaxy today. These results designate a network relying on physics we do not know as the most coherent variant, though not a probable one. The hypothesis states its refutation conditions in advance, through tests on artificial intelligence, near-Earth searches and fundamental physics.