A Universal Law of Energy Survival Governing Living Performance Across Biological and Engineered Systems

Living systems—spanning humans, animals, plants, fish, birds, insects, and microorganisms—exhibit large and persistent variability in growth, reproduction, productivity, resilience, and survival, even when exposed to broadly comparable environmental resources such as food, light, water, oxygen, and habitat. Decades of empirical research across physiology, ecology, agriculture, and medicine demonstrate that classical biological descriptors—metabolic rate, nutrient uptake, enzyme kinetics, hormonal regulation, and genetic potential—while individually well validated, remain fragmented and insufficient to quantitatively predict realized biological performance across species, environments, and time scales. Concurrently, efficiency-based energy metrics routinely overestimate usable output in both biological and engineered systems. Empirical observations reveal that ecosystem-scale photosynthesis converts only ~1–3% of incident solar energy into net biomass, utility-scale photovoltaic systems deliver ~15–25% of incident energy as grid-exportable electricity, electric drivetrains provide ~60–85% of input energy as mechanical work, and large-scale computing infrastructures convert