Recursive Cosmological Mitosis: Galactic Synchronization and the Transient Infrared Computational Signature (TICS)

We propose a falsifiable, thermodynamically constrained resolution of the Fermi problem withinthe MetaTime “refractive vacuum” program: advanced, resource-bounded, high-compute nodes aregenerically selected to become radio-silent rather than beacon-like. The mechanism is not sociological but physical: irreversible computation in a dissipative 4D brane must pay Landauer cost,forcing waste-heat channels, while the same framework permits a higher-dimensional (5D Bulk) correlation/transport sector that becomes dominant after a critical coupling transition. We then introduce galactic phenological synchronization: under shared boundary conditions (metallicity growth,stellar free-energy access, and thermodynamic compute limits), transitions to compute-dominatedphases cluster within similar cosmic windows, producing a “Grand Chorus” of synchronized silencewithout requiring interstellar colonization. Finally, we derive a falsifiable observational prediction:the Transient Infrared Computational Signature (TICS), identifying known anomalous astrophysical phenomena—such as the rapid infrared disappearance of TYC 8241 2652 1 and the “vanishingsources” of the VASCO project—as potential signatures of vertical technological transcendence