>>83054993
The main flaw seems to be that it rests on the intuition of an expedition in the mind's eye. However, as you know, to operate space-faring vessels, you need a civilization with many people, that have many more vessels. In real life, whenever we try to bar contact isolation, our success rate is almost zero. The problem compounds by many orders of magnitudes for a much larger society.
Additionally, such an advanced civilizations would be highly proficient in simulations, that the benefit of instant contact would noticeably outweigh any minor losses in simulation fidelity which it would expect to continue patching in the future anyway. Even if we assume this is not the case, the cost of contact and a first strike would have a much lower cost than hiding every sign of existence, something that would require an extreme amount of resources.
Finally, we can predict that in the long run, memetic selection (even if we assume any single observer is very different culturally, although we can predict that in their diversity, many of their sectors will be similar to our own approaches) will discourage ideas which promote isolation. At the same time, natural selection is obviously not an impediment, since we couldn't pose any credible threat.
What is much more likely is the conceptual extension of the zoo hypothesis, namely that this is a simulated Universe, but it only partly minimizes the aforementioned problems, and introduces a new host.
