Autonomous AI-Cosmoindustry and the Quiet Expansion Filter: A Threshold-Based Resolution of the Fermi Paradox

Abstract

The Fermi paradox is sharpened, not weakened, by plausible extrapolations of artificial intelligence, autonomous robotics, in-situ resource utilization, orbital manufacturing, space-based computing, and uncrewed interstellar probes. Once a civilization can design, launch, and maintain autonomous industrial systems beyond its home planet, interstellar expansion no longer requires biological starships or a human-like empire. It can proceed through low-mass probes, robotic seed factories, archival payloads, biological repositories, local computation, and slow replication across nearby stellar systems. This paper proposes the quiet expansion filter: old, stable civilizations that reached autonomous AI-cosmoindustry probably did not arise in the part of the Galaxy capable of reaching the Solar System, because after that threshold interstellar expansion becomes too useful, inexpensive, and rational for all civilizations to refuse; however, successful expansion would be machine-mediated, distributed, low-noise, and partly biological rather than Kardashev-like or imperial. Order-of-magnitude estimates indicate that a single post-threshold civilization could saturate its reachable stellar neighborhood within ~10^7 yr -- less than 0.1% of Galactic age -- at modest energy cost per probe. The novelty of the proposal lies not in any new mechanism but in extending the AI-filter literature toward post-threshold observability predictions. The hypothesis predicts that successful advanced expansion, if present, is more likely to appear as weak artifacts, local probes, small-scale resource processing, exoplanetary anomaly clusters, or techno-biological preservation systems than as galaxy-scale energy harvesting.