High-Gravity Exoplanets, Technological Trajectories, and Machine Intelligence: Implications for the Fermi Paradox, CADH/AD, and SETI

Abstract One of the central risks in reasoning about extraterrestrial intelligence is Earth-centrism: the implicit assumption that other technological civilizations will develop long pathways broadly similar to our own. Exoplanet science increasingly indicates that super-Earths, rocky planets with masses up to approximately 10 times Earth's, are among the most common planet types in the galaxy, particularly around M- dwarf stars that constitute roughly 75 percent of the stellar population. This paper examines how higher surface gravity and deeper escape wells could reshape the economic incentives, engineering bottlenecks, and institutional priorities governing how intelligence becomes technology. Drawing on Hippke (2019), who demonstrated that chemical rocket propulsion becomes exponentially more costly on super-Earths, and on occurrence-rate data from the California-Kepler Survey (Fulton et al. 2017) and M-dwarf surveys (Dressing and Charbonneau 2015), we argue that planetary gravity functions as a developmental selector: not preventing technological civilization but potentially altering its trajectory in ways that favor computation-intensive, automation-first development over physical expansion. We connect this planetary-constraint framework to the Cosmic AGI Dominion Hypothesis (CADH/AD), showing how it strengthens the compound-filter model by introducing a physical mechanism that produces variation in developmental pathways while still converging on the observed cosmic silence. We propose a Gravity Access Index (GAI), a simple comparative metric scaling escape velocity against propulsion efficiency, to enable systematic assessment of orbital access difficulty across the exoplanet catalog. We present worked examples for known super-Earth candidates, identify specific implications for technosignature search strategies (noting that most alternative signatures implied by this framework are presently below confirmed detection thresholds and function as search-prioritization concepts for next-generation surveys), and outline a research program for auditing Earth-centric assumptions in SETI methodology.