The electroweak scale (Higgs vacuum expectation value v ≈ 246 GeV, W/Z masses near 100 GeV) sits roughly 17 orders of magnitude below the Planck scale (M_Pl ≈ 10¹⁹ GeV). Quantum corrections to the Higgs mass, summed up to the Planck cutoff, should naturally drag it up to M_Pl unless cancellations are tuned to one part in 10³⁴ (Susskind 1979; Wells 2012). No accepted mechanism delivers that tuning, and decades of supersymmetry searches have come up empty.
The standard model assumes the universe began at or near the Planck scale, in a hot dense singular state where all forces were unified. That history forces the electroweak scale to look like a fine-tuning problem: the universe passed through Planck-scale energies, so why did the Higgs mass settle 17 orders of magnitude below them? The model has nowhere to put the answer.
SCT replaces the hot-dense-center with a superluminal collision between two pre-existing parent pockets. From this single change, the Planck scale never appears in our cosmological history. The collision deposited kinetic energy reaching at most the electroweak scale (T_EW ≈ 10¹⁵ K) in compressed hotspots and the QCD scale (T_QCD ≈ 1.7 × 10¹² K) in the bulk overlap volume (P22, P23). That is the same physics regime as RHIC and LHC heavy-ion collisions, just at vastly larger spatial scale.
Standard Model particles in our patch were not created at the Planck scale. They were inherited from the parent pockets that collided to make us, which were themselves products of prior collision generations stretching back through eternal time (P25, P28). The matter SCT thermalized was already organized into the Standard Model spectrum at energies well below M_Pl. The Higgs mass therefore never had Planck-scale loop corrections to fight against in our cosmological epoch, because nothing in our patch was ever at Planck energy.
This dissolves the cosmological side of the hierarchy problem. The remaining particle-physics question (why is the Higgs sector structured the way it is?) is a hard problem about the Standard Model itself, but it is no longer entangled with cosmology. There is no need to invoke supersymmetry, extra dimensions, or anthropic landscapes to suppress Planck-scale corrections that never happened in our patch's history.
Detection of any primordial relic that unambiguously requires the universe to have passed through T > T_EW would refute SCT's energy-scale ceiling. Specific signatures include grand-unification-scale magnetic monopoles at observable abundance, primordial gravitational waves at inflationary tensor-to-scalar amplitude r > 0.01 (CMB-S4, LiteBIRD), or any cosmological remnant of GUT-scale physics.