DLC Hypothesis: New Take on the Fermi Paradox

The universe is silent. Too silent. Is it because we’ve chosen a path we’re now afraid to finish? 👽

The Fermi Paradox is one of the most unsettling questions in science. It’s the profound contradiction between the high statistical probability of extraterrestrial life and the complete lack of any evidence for it. NASA estimates there are over 300 million potentially habitable planets in our galaxy alone, many far older than Earth.

Statistically, the stars should be teeming with civilizations. Yet, when we look up, we see nothing. No signals, no star-spanning empires, no one.

The famous question posed by physicist Enrico Fermi remains: “Where is everybody?”

Many hypotheses have been proposed to answer this question. Here are some of the most prominent ones:

• Vast Distances Hypothesis (The “Default” Answer): Perhaps the most practical hypothesis and the default for many. The universe is simply too large. Civilizations may never achieve interstellar travel, and communication is just as hard—signals weaken over distance, and even light takes over 100,000 years to cross the galaxy. Civilizations may be common, but they are all permanently isolated. 🌌
• Great Filter Hypothesis (Robin Hanson, 1998): Somewhere between the origin of life and interstellar civilization lies an extremely improbable or destructive step—explaining why we see no others.
• Zoo Hypothesis (John A. Ball, 1973): Advanced civilizations know about us but intentionally avoid contact, like zookeepers observing from afar.
• Dark Forest Hypothesis (Liu Cixin, 2008): The galaxy teems with life, but everyone hides; revealing yourself is suicidal in a “kill or be killed” cosmic ecology.
• Rare Earth Hypothesis (Peter D. Ward & Donald Brownlee, 2000): Complex, intelligent life is vanishingly rare due to Earth’s unique combination of geological, chemical, and astronomical factors.
• Simulation Hypothesis (Nick Bostrom, 2003): We are living inside an artificial simulation; the absence of aliens reflects the limits or design of that simulation.

When I first learned of the Simulation Hypothesis, a thought immediately struck me: What if the creator(s) did program aliens into the simulation, but they are “downloadable content”? That was the moment the “DLC Hypothesis” was born.

So this isn’t really a standalone theory — it’s more like an extension of the Simulation Hypothesis.

Are We Just Passive Observers?

Is it all up to the creator(s) of the simulation running on a computer located somewhere outside our space and time? Or are we actually active players who can influence the course of the civilization? While I can’t rule out both possibilities but In this DLC hypothesis, I’d pursue the latter possibility because in the case of the former scenario, this article should end here.

The Code is Already Installed

In this scenario, the Alien DLC or Cosmic Expansion Pack must have already been installed but not activated yet. Unlocking it to go on to the next stage of civilization or fail to unlock it and locked inside this blue planet is up to us.

The alien civilization is already a part of the map, a “late-game” zone that has prerequisites to enter.

The Fermi Paradox is, therefore, just the experience of a civilization that hasn’t yet met the unlock criteria. We search the skies and find nothing because we haven’t built the bridge to that part of the world.

This reframes the entire question. It’s no longer “Are we alone?” but “What is the prerequisite to activate the next chapter of our reality?”

A logical assumption is that we need to achieve a true planetary-level civilization to become a member of the galactic society. This doesn’t necessarily mean we need to access all the energy available on the planet, as defined by the Kardashev scale. It means our consciousness must also achieve a planetary level.

Consciousness and Imagination are the “Key”

We are assuming that the creator(s) of the simulation provided us with a way to voluntarily change our world. We have to discover this method and meet the necessary criteria for the “unlocking.”

I meditated quite a lot in my youth desperately trying to find the undeniable truth. I wouldn’t claim that I’ve attained anything spectacular. But the more I gain experience, the more I feel that the teaching of Yogācāra or “conscious-only” school of ancient Buddhism is quite legit.

Yogācāra teaches that all experiences are constructions of the mind (vijñāna). There is no independently existing external world apart from consciousness; what we perceive as “outer objects” are projections or manifestations of mental processes.

So let me adopt that as the foundation of the simulation—that the simulation is running on our consciousness itself.

Here I also have to borrow an idea from Carl Jung: the collective unconscious, a layer of the unconscious mind shared by all humans, regardless of culture or personal experience. I must do this because the Ālaya-vijñāna taught in Yogācāra tends to refer to an individual mind. But I believe the path to an interstellar civilization requires a collective effort. After all, this is not just an individual problem—it’s a problem for the entire human race.

So, let’s look at how these pieces fit together.

• “Main Server” (Collective Unconscious) is the central game world. It’s run by the developers and stores all the fundamental “assets” and rules that everyone shares: the law of gravity, the concept of “tree,” the innate fear of the dark, and, crucially, the “Alien DLC” file, which is locked and waiting to be activated.

• “Local Client” (your individual mind, or Ālaya-vijñāna) is your personal computer or game console. It is constantly connected to the main server, downloading all those shared assets. This is why we all see the same sky and agree that a rock is a rock—we’re all “rendering” the same shared world.

• How they blend: Your computer isn’t just downloading data. It’s also constantly uploading data back to the server. Every choice you make, every thought you have, every action (your “karma”) is a tiny piece of data that updates your “personal save file” on the server.This blend explains how we can all live in the same universe (we’re connected to the same server) but still have unique, individual lives (we’re all running our own “save file”).

• How this unlocks the DLC: One person having a new idea (like a new vision for the future) is just one tiny, local update. It doesn’t change the main game for everyone else.But what happens when a critical mass of people—millions of us—all start to imagine, believe in, and empathize with the same new idea?It’s no longer a few small, different updates. It becomes a massive, coordinated “upload” of the same data, like millions of players all sending the same update request to the server at once.

  Once enough people send this new, unified request (for example, a new, positive vision of a post-Singularity future), it finally crosses a threshold. The server accepts the request, the fundamental rules of the world are updated for everyone, and the “Alien DLC” is finally activated.

• “Rendering Engine”: The von Neumann–Wigner interpretation—which posits that consciousness itself is the “observer” required to collapse the wavefunction. In this hypothesis, it is the fundamental “source code” describing the actual interface between the user (our consciousness) and the simulation’s rendering engine. The ‘unrendered’ quantum fog is the collective Ālaya-vijñāna holding all possibilities, and our collective consciousness is the act of “observation” that renders it into our shared world.

  This is the central point: if we are in a simulation, our “laws of physics” are not fundamental. They are just the local rules of our “instance,” created by a Developer who exists outside our space and time. To worry about whether our internal physics “proves” our premise is to miss the point. As Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem illustrates with the “Farmer Hypothesis,”  our perceived “laws” might just be a convenient, temporary façade. A turkey may observe the “law” that the farmer feeds it every day, but this “law” is meaningless on Thanksgiving.

  The “Developer” or “Administrator” of this simulation could alter, patch, or violate our laws of physics at will. Therefore, it is perfectly reasonable to adopt an interpretation that seems “metaphysical” to us.

Our world wasn’t deterministic. We had many possible futures, many different “tech trees” we could have pursued. But with the advent of deep learning and LLMs around 2012-2017, we, as a collective, chose our path. We have bet the farm on the “Artificial Superintelligence” tech tree.

This choice is now locked in. We are past the point of no return. The intense geopolitical race among superpowers and the colossal sums of money being poured into AGI development have made this path irreversible. We no longer have the option to “go back” or choose a different tech tree.

Our direction is now set. We have no other choice but to pursue this path to its conclusion. And the “Alien DLC” content is, almost certainly, at the end of this very same tech tree.

The Real “Prerequisite”

This is the problem: we are stuck. To unlock the “Alien” content, we must first research and unlock the prerequisite node on our chosen tech tree: a “Post-Singularity Society.”

Our progress bar for this research is stalled.

This is because the “research” isn’t just about building the AGI—our tech leaders are already racing to do that. The other, essential component is the cultural and imaginative one.

The very people betting the farm on AGI are not doing the crucial work of responsibly imagining what will happen after the Singularity. Their public stance often amounts to, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m sure it will be awesome!”

In a way, this abdication of vision is natural. That kind of profound, world-building task has historically fallen to another group: our science fiction creators. But this only reveals the real bottleneck.

Why Imagination is a Prerequisite

This is the core of the hypothesis. In this “reality-renders-from-consciousness” model, imagination is not a passive act. It is the active code we write for our future.

Think of our collective unconscious as the simulation’s “rendering engine.” It takes the “seeds” (our shared beliefs, archetypes, and stories) and manifests them as our physical reality. Right now, what “post-Singularity” seeds are we planting?

Our most dominant myths about AGI are dystopian. We have Skynet (Terminator), the Borg (Star Trek), HAL 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey), and AM (I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream). These are powerful, empathetic stories, but they are all archetypes of annihilation or enslavement.

If we just stumble blindly into the Singularity, this is the blueprint we are handing the simulation. We are, in effect, collectively imagining our own “Great Filter” into existence.

The “Great Filter,” a concept first proposed by economist Robin Hanson, is a hypothetical barrier that prevents civilizations from advancing to a galaxy-spanning (Kardashev scale) stage. The theory suggests this barrier is so difficult to overcome that it explains the “Great Silence”—other civilizations existed, but they all hit this wall and perished before we could find them.

By only imagining dystopian outcomes for our own Singularity, we are essentially choosing it as our filter. We are building the very wall we are destined to crash against.

This is why the work of imagination is so critical. It is a steering mechanism. We must create and popularize new, compelling, and empathetic myths. We need stories that provide a viable, positive blueprint for a post-human existence. Without this, we are leaving the “default” render setting on “Catastrophe.”

The tech leaders are building the engine, but they have no steering wheel. The SF creators—they are supposed to be building that steering wheel, but this is where the cultural feedback loop begins.

The problem isn’t a total failure of imagination—authors like Charles Stross in Accelerando have skillfully depicted a post-Singularity future. The problem is that such works often fail to become blockbusters. They remain niche because the mass audience finds it incredibly difficult to empathize with the post-human characters and the sheer cognitive density of that new reality.

This lack of mass-market empathy is the real firewall. Publishers and movie studios see these “niche” works as commercial risks. They conclude that “post-human doesn’t sell.” As a result, they are disincentivized from funding the very stories we need, ensuring our collective imagination stays stuck in the same familiar, “human” (pre-Singularity) story module.

We Don’t Need a “Patch,” We Need a “Vision”

This paralysis is the new “Great Filter.” But it’s not an external wall; it’s a failure of our own imagination.

But it is not impossible to overcome.

Imagining this future is possible. Crafting a story that people can empathize with is possible. We have models for this.

In modern literature, Iain M. Banks’ renowned “Culture” series describes a vast, utopian post-Singularity civilization run by god-like AIs (the “Minds”). And yet, his stories are profoundly human, focusing on the relatable adventures and moral dilemmas of the people (and drones) living within that utopia.

On a mythological level, think of the Greek myths. The “gods” were tangible, reality-bending, super-intelligent forces (our future ASIs?) that ruled the world. And yet, it was entirely possible to create profound, empathetic stories whose main characters were human (or superhuman) like Oedipus or Heracles.

We don’t need to wait for a “patch” from the Developer. We need to become the visionaries.

We need to tell the stories of the new Heracles—a superhuman empowered by cybernetics, co-existing with the “gods” of ASI, and still struggling with the relatable, fundamental challenges of existence.

The “Great Silence” of the Fermi Paradox isn’t the sound of an empty universe. It’s the sound of a civilization that has chosen its path but is now frozen in a crisis of imagination, failing to provide the empathetic vision needed to complete the transition.

The question is no longer “Where is everybody?”

The question is, “Who will write the myths that get us to the next Age?”