Mru whitepaper

Source and PDF for the Mru whitepaper, A Fault-Tolerant Operating System for Thousand-Year Autonomous Operation, by Will Binns. The project lives at mru.space.

Systems that still run a thousand years after we're gone.

Versions

• 1.1.1, October 2026: archived on Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.23305299. Fixes the layout of Figures 4, 5, 7 and 8, four references and one heading, and updates the author's email. The text is the same as 1.1.
• 1.1, October 2026: archived on Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.20580927. Adds related work on degradable systems and spacecraft redundancy management, the first evidence for the Layer 1 policy (Dusk and the Mru Flight bench), and an errata section that lists every change from 1.0 and why.
• 1.0, May 2026: archived on Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.20579438.

Abstract

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. It formalizes the stance as the Degradation-First Principle and derives 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 it designs hardware consensus among failing nodes, knowledge triage, autonomous science, bandwidth-starved communication, and bounded self-modification, with a plan to validate them in simulation grounded in published radiation, power, and failure models.

Version 1.1 adds the first evidence, for one part of one layer: a Monte Carlo simulator of the Layer 1 redundancy policy and a measured prototype of its decision core, both on general-purpose processors. Layers 0 and 2 to 5 are not built.

Read it

• PDF: mru.pdf in this repo, or the canonical copy at mru.space/mru-whitepaper.pdf.
• Archived record: Zenodo (doi:10.5281/zenodo.23305299). The concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20579437 always resolves to the latest version.

Repository layout

mru.tex   # LaTeX source (article class, 10pt, A4)
mru.bib   # BibTeX bibliography
mru.pdf   # compiled paper (committed for convenience)

Building from source

Requires a TeX distribution (TeX Live / MacTeX). The paper uses BibTeX (\bibliographystyle{ieeetr}), so run the standard four-pass build:

pdflatex mru
bibtex   mru
pdflatex mru
pdflatex mru

Or, more simply, with latexmk:

latexmk -pdf mru.tex

Build artifacts (*.aux, *.bbl, *.log, …) are git-ignored.

Citing

If you reference this work, please cite it (and see TRADEMARK.md on use of the name):

@misc{binns2026mru,
  author       = {Binns, Will},
  title        = {Mru: A Fault-Tolerant Operating System for
                  Thousand-Year Autonomous Operation},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = oct,
  version      = {1.1.1},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.23305299},
  howpublished = {\url{https://mru.space}},
}

Questions or contributions

Issues and PRs aren't open to the public on this repo, but we'd love to hear from you. Email contact@mru.space.

License & trademark

• Whitepaper (text, figures, and LaTeX/BibTeX source): CC BY 4.0: share and adapt with attribution.
• The Mru name and logo are trademarks. See TRADEMARK.md. The code license/CC license cover the work itself, not the brand.

© Mru Aerospace, Inc.