The Ripeness Equation: A Predictive Framework for the Emergence of Life in a Cyclic, Non-Markovian Universe

The search for life beyond Earth has traditionally relied on static habitability criteria, most prominently the presence of liquid water and suitable surface temperatures. These criteria are useful, but they ignore a deeper feature of planetary history: life does not simply fit into an environment, it emerges when a planet has developed enough internal coordination to support self-maintaining chemical networks. This work introduces the Ripeness Framework, a quantitative model that evaluates planetary life potential as a cumulative, time-integrated measure of coordination across five interacting factors: (i) cosmic inheritance, (ii) material substrate, (iii) geodynamic energy, (iv) feedback stability, and (v) external modulation. Two functionals are formulated: a linear ripeness functional and an enhanced CIOU functional that incorporates cross-domain coupling, information accumulation, and stability weighting, thereby encoding explicit non-Markovian path-dependence. Motivated by galaxy- and cosmology-scale results in which internal state and homeostatic memory dominate over instantaneous environment, ripeness is treated as an internal-state-first quantity: environment modulates and exposes ripeness but does not by itself create life. Toy simulations for Earth, Mars, and Europa reproduce three distinct developmental patterns: Earth shows non-linear acceleration in late-stage maturity, Mars exhibits developmental collapse, and Europa remains in a nascent pre-threshold state. A synthetic exoplanet ensemble with N = 106 planets demonstrates that classical habitable-zone metrics and developmental ripeness select systematically different targets: only a minority of planets are both environmentally “habitable” and developmentally ripe, while a larger population is developmentally ripe outside the classical habitable band. The framework yields falsifiable predictions: complex life should occur only on worlds that surpass a ripeness threshold and sustain cross-domain coupling over geological timescales; discovery of complex life on a low-ripeness world would falsify the CIOU-enhanced formulation. This approach reframes habitability from a spatial label to a developmental trajectory, and provides a testable basis for prioritising biosignature targets within a cyclic, non-Markovian cosmology. In other words, a planet may not be ripe for life in this time, but could ripen to develop and sustain life in the future.