The Biological Event Horizon: A Terrain–Timing Theory of Reversibility

Why does removing a primary stressor often fail to cure a chronic disease? This monograph formalizes the Biological Event Horizon—the critical systems-level threshold where a chronic physiological disturbance becomes autonomously driven by the host's internal adaptive alterations rather than its initiating cause. Using complex-systems resilience modeling, this paper maps the mechanics of terrain carryover, functional pathway capture, and distributed frequency traps. It delivers concrete, falsifiable mathematical precursors to track an organism’s proximity to irreversible collapse through challenge-recovery kinetics and rising temporal autocorrelation.