Engineering the Avoidance of Collapse: Early Warning Indicators and Safety Margins Across Domains

This paper presents a domain-agnostic framework for understanding collapse as a predictable engineering failure mode preceded by measurable degradation in a system's capacity to export accumulated incoherence. We define collapse as the irreversible transition to equilibrium-dominated dynamics after sustained saturation of active negentropy throughput. Early warning indicators and safety margins, already existent but fragmented across disciplines (physical, computational, biological, economic, social), are unified under a common operational vocabulary. The framework enables real-time detection of pre-collapse states and practical design principles for collapse avoidance. No new physical laws are introduced; already-measured mechanisms are formalized under a shared engineering lens.