Chapter 30: Death, Decomposition, and Aging

Death and decomposition are the closure sector’s completion, returning the organism to the material cycle. Aging is recast through defect thermodynamics: the defect functional V_n grows monotonically in every finite-lineage carrier, and when it exceeds the repair budget, the carrier fails. This chapter formalizes aging as defect accumulation, establishes the repair-budget exhaustion proposition, examines the Hayflick limit and telomere attrition as biological instantiations, and traces the five stages of post-mortem decomposition that return material to the closure sector.