My answer to the Fermi Paradox

The Cosmic Booby Trap Scenario

(The Dead Space inspired explanation)

The Cosmic Booby Trap Scenario proposes a solution to the Fermi Paradox by suggesting that most sufficiently advanced civilizations inevitably encounter a Great Filter—a catastrophic event or technological hazard—such as self-augmenting artificial intelligence, autonomous drones, nanorobots, advanced weaponry or even dangerous ideas that, when encountered, lead to the downfall of the civilization that discovers them. These existential threats, whether self-inflicted or externally encountered, have resulted in the extinction of numerous civilizations before they could achieve long-term interstellar expansion.

However, a rare subset of civilizations may have avoided or temporarily bypassed such filters, allowing them to persist. These surviving emergent civilizations, while having thus far escaped early-stage existential risks, remain at high risk of encountering the same filters as they expand into space.

Dooming them by the very pursuit of expansion and exploration.

These existential threats can manifest in two primary ways:

Indirect Encounter – A civilization might unintentionally stumble upon a dormant but still-active filter (e.g., biological hazards, self-replicating entities, singularities or leftover remnants of destructive technologies).

Direct Encounter – By searching for extraterrestrial intelligence or exploring the remnants of extinct civilizations, a species might inadvertently reactivate or expose itself to the very dangers that led to previous extinctions.

Thus, the Cosmic Booby Trap Scenario suggests that the universe's relative silence and apparent scarcity of advanced civilizations may not solely be due to early-stage Great Filters, but rather due to a high-probability existential risk that is encountered later in the course of interstellar expansion. Any civilization that reaches a sufficiently advanced stage of space exploration is likely to trigger, awaken, or be destroyed by the very same dangers that have already eliminated previous civilizations—leading to a self-perpetuating cycle of cosmic silence.

The core idea being that exploration itself becomes the vector of annihilation.

In essence, the scenario flips the Fermi Paradox on its head—while many think the silence is due to civilizations being wiped out too early, this proposes that the silence may actually be the result of civilizations reaching a point of technological maturity, only to be wiped out in the later stages by the cosmic threats they unknowingly unlock.