Is the asymmetry between liability and prevention cost large enough to bind without timing assumptions?

A subsidiary question under Q-0003 and Q-0004. The recommendation requires action; action requires that the case be defensible without depending on a specific surfacing timeline. Q-0028 asks whether the asymmetry meets that bar.

The answer is C-0027. On the liability side: ~$1.1B/year in unverifiable research output at a $200M R1 (C-0005), rising with publication volume, against a probability of surfacing that three vectors (C-0025) are pushing up simultaneously. On the prevention side: protocol-level preservation that runs on existing institutional server infrastructure at effectively zero marginal cost (C-0006), and at $42-$360 per node per year for standalone deployment.

The asymmetry is large enough that the surfacing trajectory does not need to materialize on any specific timeline for the recommendation to follow. Even in a world where the architectural-extension scenario remains untested in litigation across the next decade, the continuous erosion documented in C-0026 alone justifies the deployment. The 1:10:100 cost heuristic (M-0004) holds at minimum — and arguably at 1:1,000,000 in this specific case, given the gap between Tier 3 deployment cost and the latent liability.

The decision to deploy does not require the institution to take a position on when the trajectory fires; it requires only the institution to take a position that paying a rounding error to hedge a billion-dollar tail exposure is worth doing.