A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. To be sure, this is a powerful, poignant refrain that is easy to fathom when you imagine said chain is only six, even 12 links long. But what if your chain consists of 50 links? Thousands of links? Imagine you had a chain with enough links to span several continents. Now finding the weakest link becomes more of a needle in a haystack. What if large swaths of those links had widely varying degrees of strength? How do even begin to account for every component, every variable, every stress put on your impossibly long chain?

You know where we’re going with this.