S = 363.5117 billion life-years — epoch 2026-10-26, Ē 44.92 years. The index →

SAECULUM

(ruled 2026-09-04; formerly CHRONON. USPTO filing is PREPARED, not yet made — no clearance is claimed. Repo/org URLs migrate when the saeculum.foundation domain attaches.)

A demographically-ruled monetary asset. TLY is the index: humanity's total remaining life-years, S(t) = Σ over (age, sex, country) of population × remaining life expectancy. Mirror is the protocol whose token supply algorithmically mirrors S. SAECULUM (SAEC) is the token. Price floats; the formula governs supply only.

Layered rollout (DECISIONS.md #1): v1 index → v2 cash-settled derivatives → v3 Mirror token → v4 Ledger.

Governing documents

File	Role
`DECISIONS.md`	Locked design decisions. Never contradicted.
`RESEARCH_PROGRAM.md`	The full map: math, data, phases, gates, governance.
`SPEC.md`	The seven build capabilities with acceptance criteria.
`METHODOLOGY_v0.md`	The v0 math: estimator, transport identity, error budget.
`RALPH_LOOP.md`	The autonomous build loop protocol.

Provenance notice (A-16 CLOSED 2026-09-03): the 2026-08-16 loss was resolved by RESTORE, not ratification-of-reconstruction: seed/ and METHODOLOGY_v0.md are the verbatim originals (delivered back in chronon-restore-A16.zip); the reconstructions remain archived under ops/reconstruction/2026-08-16/, still byte-runnable. AC-1.2 is strict: the v1 engine reproduces every original golden value to 4 dp on the frozen data/snapshots/v0-original/ inputs.

Series status: the G5 source-of-record switch (WHO → UN WPP 2024, CC BY 3.0 IGO) was accepted 2026-09-04 as methodology v0.7.0 — the live settlement path now cites only commercially cleared sources and passes the licensing gate with zero violations; the first v0.7.0 print is the 2026-09-07 epoch (archived prints stand as printed, P4). Level change +0.3033%, dual-run published in the proposal and changelog. Nothing here is investment advice; settlement-grade status still awaits the P5 hardening (external recomputers, oversight, audits — tracked openly).

Principles (non-negotiable)

Radical verifiability. Every published figure is computed by open code from keyless public endpoints, prints its source URLs, and is reproducible by any third party. No number ships without a runnable path.
First print settles. Corrections are forward-only, in ledger/CORRECTIONS.md. No historical value is ever restated.
Decimal everywhere supply- or index-adjacent (precision 34, ROUND_HALF_EVEN). Floats never touch published numbers.
Snapshot-first. Fetch to data/snapshots/<date>/ with a sha256 manifest, then compute offline. Small v0 snapshots are committed; large snapshots move to object storage with manifests committed in-repo (RESEARCH_PROGRAM Part VII).
Licensing gate. docs/LICENSING.md must be cleared before the first public print.

Live site + API

https://chronon-index.pages.dev — the rendered governance pages and the static JSON API (/api/v1/latest.json, /api/v1/prints/<date>.json, /api/v1/index.json with sha256s). The API serves the archived prints byte-verbatim; a path that was never printed returns 404 — absence is an answer. The tree is committed under site/ and rebuilt by CI after every print; the suite asserts the committed tree equals a fresh build.

Layout

tly/              the package (index computation)
seed/             v0 calculator and its golden output (ground truth)
tests/            pytest suite; the golden test anchors every refactor
data/snapshots/   content-hashed input snapshots
docs/             licensing table, governance artifacts
ledger/           forward-only correction ledger
loop/             Ralph-loop state: BACKLOG.md, JOURNAL.md, LEARNINGS.md
.github/          CI (tests on push) + weekly Monday 12:00 UTC print job

Run

python3.12 -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e '.[dev]'
pytest

Autonomous build: ./ralph.sh (see RALPH_LOOP.md).

Licensing

Code: Apache-2.0 (LICENSE). Documentation and published index data: CC BY 4.0. Upstream data licenses: docs/LICENSING.md.