Physical records
✨From tkwa.me
Physical records describe the extremes of built size, vehicle speed and material survival. The selections below give records standing at the 3-billion-CE epoch in the settled regions from Virgo to the Shapley core, together with the Old Solar collections. Reports were assembled by 4 billion CE. Each row identifies its class or collection; quantities are ordered within each table.
Largest engineered installations
Extent is the greatest straight-line separation between an installation’s physical components, measured in its local rest frame. An astronomical unit (AU) is 149.6 million kilometres. Distributed installations include the spaces between their parts. A collection net can therefore span hundreds of light-years while its solid machinery occupies a small fraction of that volume. The entries are the largest examples in five engineering classes covered by the comparison.
| Installation and class | Extent | Physical arrangement |
|---|---|---|
| Centaurus collection net · scoop fleet | 320 light-years | Field-generator chains feed separate braking yards along the same gas stream. Local sections respond to approaching material independently. |
| Fornax cold crescent · computing estate | 12 light-years | Inhabited processing islands occupy the dark gaps between radiator fields. Traffic follows the crescent’s open inner edge. |
| Perseus reservoir rack · gas store | 4,000 AU | Gas occupies separately orbiting vessels. Empty lanes separate the vessels and give a leaking cell room to vent. |
| Outer collector shell · Solar swarm | 6 AU | Independent collector orbits surround the Sun; their spacing leaves passage corridors and clear views for radiators. |
| Braided nursery · living harbour | 0.004 AU | Silk tethers join pressure chambers and nurseries for living starships across 598,000 kilometres. Growing animals renew the tethers. |
A message takes 320 years to cross the collection net and twelve years to cross the cold crescent. Their largest dimension governs how slowly the whole installation can change its plans. The nursery’s corresponding delay is about two seconds.
Fastest material carriers
Speeds are measured relative to a freely falling frame initially at rest with the departure station; c is the speed of light in vacuum.[1] Each record includes a loaded vehicle, a coast lasting at least one hour in that frame and an intact payload recovered at the destination. The fastest dart used a cleared 200-AU course between accelerator and receiving arrays. Ordinary routes require shielding against their accumulated gas and dust column.[3]
| Carrier class | Cruise speed | Record passage |
|---|---|---|
| Archive dart | 0.9999c | A one-kilogram material archive crossed the cleared course behind a sacrificial nose. Preceding sweeps removed gas and dust. |
| Repertory instrument courier | 0.90c | The cargo included an original optical instrument for reconstructed explosions; a forward shield was consumed during the journey. |
| Industrial seed convoy | 0.30c | Replicating equipment arrived with its founding archive and enough machinery to build the receiving settlement’s next generation of factories. |
| Comet dairy carrier | 0.0002c | Grazing animals digested cometary material into refined water and nutrients. Their laden migration retained a reserve for the calves. |
| Occupied starweevil | 0.0001c | The passenger ship reached about 30 kilometres per second. Collecting wings supplied its propulsion organs; stored water provided reaction mass. |
At 0.9999c, each kilogram carries 6.27 × 1018 joules of kinetic energy in the departure frame.[2] Acceleration must supply that energy and arrival must remove it. The dart’s 27.7-hour coast lasts about 23.5 minutes aboard it. The gas and dust column remains the same in the departure frame. Living ships carried their power collectors and reaction mass; the dart used station-mounted propulsion and braking.
Oldest retained material
These are the oldest original pieces in five collections at the same reference epoch. Age runs from the named piece’s manufacture to 3 billion CE. Surrounding apparatus may be replaced; the listed substrate must survive. A new copy begins a new material history, even when it carries an older memory.
| Original piece and collection | Made in CE | Age at the reference epoch |
|---|---|---|
| Stationary rig’s brake drum · Marenbroek collection | 1961 | 2,999,998,039 years |
| Sealed assay pellet · Carina torus collection | 10,680 | 2,999,989,320 years |
| Glass memory plate · Cold Meridian reserve collection | 1,200,000,000 | 1,800,000,000 years |
| Projection mirror · Repertory travelling collection | 2,740,000,000 | 260,000,000 years |
| Restart timing crystal · breakfast club collection | 2,999,000,000 | 1,000,000 years |
The drum and pellet spend most of their existence in cold, shielded storage. The mirror keeps its original reflecting substrate while mounts and pointing equipment change around it. The timing crystal outlives successive restart controllers. A club can preserve the same diners for one-hour breakfasts a thousand years apart through many generations of archive hardware. Its inhabitants’ continuity and its oldest surviving object have separate dates.
See also
- Economy of the available universe — energy, material and transport costs.
- Cooling rights — the surroundings needed by heat-rejection equipment.
- Interregional Accounts Concordance — comparisons assembled across long communication delays.
References
- ↑ National Institute of Standards and Technology. CODATA value: speed of light in vacuum.
- ↑ NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Cosmicopia: forces and motion.
- ↑ Hoang, Thiem; Lazarian, A.; Burkhart, Blakesley; Loeb, Abraham (2016). The interaction of relativistic spacecrafts with the interstellar medium.