Cosmic Resource Inequality: Elemental Inheritance, the Material Potential Scale, and Technological Opportunity in Planetary Systems

Assumes deep technical literacy. Bridges to the closest neighbouring fields.

The paper introduces a framework called **Cosmic Resource Inequality (CRI)** and a **Material Potential Scale (MPS)** to argue that the inherited chemical composition of a planetary system—from the natal molecular cloud—creates measurable differences in habitable and technological potential. The **novel** contribution is the MPS itself: a composition-based classification that ranks systems by their accessible material resources (e.g., rock-forming elements, radiogenic heat sources, rare earths) rather than by energy consumption like the Kardashev scale. This shifts focus from energy to material opportunity as a complementary axis for astrobiology and technosignature studies. Another novel aspect is the formalization of a continuous vector-valued metric (with domain scores for biology, geology, metallurgy, etc.) and a discrete six-level scale (MPS-0 to MPS-5) to capture resource envelopes. The paper is **incremental** in that it builds on established links between stellar abundances and planet composition (e.g., Mg/Si ratios affecting mantle mineralogy) and on known variations in radiogenic heating from U, Th, and K. It also extends concepts like the Galactic Habitable Zone by explicitly including a chemical dimension, and it synthesizes prior work on r-process enrichment and star-planet composition links without introducing new observational data. **Key assumptions** that matter include: host-star abundances are a reliable first-order proxy for rocky-planet bulk composition, despite disk processing and differentiation; the MPS is an *input* metric that assesses resource opportunity, not a deterministic predictor of civilizational achievement; the Solar System is treated as a reference but not an optimum; geological accessibility of elements (e.g., ore formation) can be modeled even though such processes are poorly constrained for exoplanets; and functional element classes (bioessential, metallurgical, nuclear) are appropriate for ranking technological bottlenecks. The framework also assumes that the MPS is falsifiable via stellar catalogs, polluted white dwarfs, and exoplanet demographics, but it explicitly avoids chemical determinism by acknowledging social and historical contingencies. Overall, the paper proposes a testable research program to treat chemical inequality as a first-order boundary condition for habitability and technosignature targeting, complementing traditional luminosity- and orbit-based approaches.

AI-generated (deepseek-v4-flash) · created 2026-05-28