Information-Thermodynamic Bounds on Planetary Biosphere Productivity and Their Observational Tests

Abstract

The productivity of a planetary biosphere is limited by how its free-energy budget is partitioned between maintaining a habitable environment, driving metabolism, and processing heritable information. We derive an upper bound on net primary productivity (NPP) from non-equilibrium thermodynamics and information theory, given a planet's usable free-energy flux and a few coarse-grained biological parameters. The bound subtracts an irreducible power cost of heritable information processing -- set by global template-copying rates, copying fidelity, alphabet size, and proofreading work -- from the planetary power budget before converting the remainder into biomass. This yields an ``information-productivity trade-off'': at fixed planetary power, higher copying rates, lower error rates, larger alphabets, or more intensive proofreading all lower the ceiling on biomass production. Using conservative parameter choices, we show that Earth lies well below this ceiling, whereas low-flux environments such as M-dwarf habitable zones and subsurface ocean worlds can be driven into an information-limited regime where only modest combinations of productivity and heritable complexity are attainable. We outline how future exoplanet observations of stellar irradiation, climate, atmospheric disequilibria, and temporal variability could be used to place physics-based upper limits on NPP and compare them with independent productivity estimates.