Beyond Efficiency: A Universal Energy Survival Law for Communication, Energy, and Living Systems

Abstract

Conventional energy efficiency metrics systematically overestimate usable energy delivery in real systems by treating energy conversion as a single-stage process and by neglecting irreversible thermodynamic degradation. Across biological metabolism, renewable energy technologies, electric propulsion, data centers, and mobile communication networks, observed field-scale performance consistently falls far below laboratory or nameplate efficiencies. In modern telecom infrastructure, rising power consumption has failed to deliver proportional gains in information throughput, revealing fundamental limits not captured by efficiency or energy-per-bit metrics.

Here we introduce a Unified Energy Survival–Absorption–Conversion Law that reformulates useful energy production as a survival-limited, multi-stage process governed by irreversible thermodynamics and reaction–transport constraints. We define an energy survival factor

Ψ=AE/TE+ε,

where AEAE is absorbed energy retained within the system boundary, TETE represents transport and environmental dissipation losses, and εε denotes irreducible entropy-generating losses required by the second law of thermodynamics. Coupling ΨΨ with an internal conversion competency term derived from the Life-CAES reaction–transport framework yields a universal performance law,