Grand Unified Theories predict that the early universe, on cooling through the GUT symmetry-breaking temperature near 10¹⁵ GeV, should have produced magnetic monopoles abundantly through the Kibble mechanism. The predicted monopole-to-photon ratio is roughly unity, so monopoles should be as common as photons today. None has ever been detected (Preskill 1979; Kibble 1976). ΛCDM has to invoke inflation to dilute them to negligible abundance.
The standard model assumes a hot dense origin where the universe passed through GUT-scale temperatures (~10²⁸ K) during a singular initial phase. Under that assumption, GUT-scale phase transitions are mandatory and would have produced topological defects copiously. The model has nowhere to put the missing monopoles except by exponentially diluting them with an inflationary epoch.
SCT replaces the hot-dense-center with a superluminal collision between two pre-existing parent pockets. From this single change, the universe never reached GUT-scale temperatures. The collision deposited kinetic energy reaching at most T_EW ≈ 10¹⁵ K in compressed hotspots and T_QCD ≈ 1.7 × 10¹² K in the bulk overlap volume (P22, P23) — the same physics regime as RHIC and LHC heavy-ion collisions, just at vastly larger spatial scale. That is many orders of magnitude below the GUT scale where monopoles would form.
Standard Model particles in our patch were not created at the GUT scale during a hot-dense-singularity phase transition. 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, P26, P28). The matter that SCT thermalized was already organized into the Standard Model spectrum at energies well below T_GUT. No GUT phase transition occurred in our cosmological history, so no monopoles formed, so none are observed. The absence is a prediction, not a problem.
The same M1 mechanism dissolves the hierarchy problem (recid 6), the horizon problem (recid 14), and the flatness problem (recid 10). All of these tensions exist because the standard model assumes the universe passed through Planck-and-GUT-scale energies. Once that assumption is replaced with the cascade-thermalization picture, the monopole problem (and the inflationary remedy) becomes unnecessary.
Discovery of any primordial GUT-scale relic (a magnetic monopole, a cosmic string, or any topological defect requiring T > T_EW to form) would refute SCT's energy-scale ceiling. The IceCube and ANITA monopole-search programs provide ongoing observational tests; a confirmed primordial monopole detection would refute M1.