Mru: A Fault-Tolerant Operating System for Thousand-Year Autonomous Operation
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Published May 2026
| Version 1.0
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Mru: A Fault-Tolerant Operating System for Thousand-Year Autonomous Operation
Authors/Creators
Binns, Will<br>(Researcher)1
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Binns Pte. Ltd.
Description
No software system in human history has been designed to operate for centuries without human intervention. The longest-lived systems we have built—deep-space probes approaching fifty years of service, banking codebases approaching sixty—survive only through continuous human maintenance. An interstellar probe operating for 500 to 1,000 years cannot: its hardware is guaranteed to fail, its power to decline, its memory to corrupt, and the light-delay makes human guidance physically impossible. This paper introduces Mru, an open-source operating system that treats this physical decay not as an exceptional fault but as the governing design constraint. I formalize the stance as the Degradation-First Principle and derive from it a layered architecture modeled on biological robustness: a minimal, formally verified interpreter, replicated across reconfigurable hardware, that executes behavior encoded as mutable data—the way DNA encodes behavior run by a replicated molecular interpreter. On this kernel I build hardware consensus among failing nodes, knowledge triage, autonomous science, bandwidth-starved communication, and bounded self-modification, validated in simulation grounded in published radiation, power, and failure models. I argue that designing software to outlive its makers is not speculation but a tractable engineering discipline—one the interstellar case makes unavoidable, and a growing class of terrestrial systems increasingly needs.
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https://github.com/mruspace/whitepaper
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Keywords and subjects
Keywords
autonomous systems
fault tolerance
interstellar probe
graceful degradation
formal verification
operating systems
EuroSciVoc
Aerospace engineering
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DOI
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DOI
10.5281/zenodo.20579438
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[](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20579438)
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https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20579438
Resource type<br>Working paper
Publisher<br>mru.space
Languages
English
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
The Creative Commons Attribution license allows re-distribution and re-use of a licensed work on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited.
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Copyright
Copyright (C) 2026 Binns Pte. Ltd.
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Created
June 7, 2026
Modified
June 7, 2026
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