Schelling points are the dark matter of civilization. In 1960, Schelling asked people to coordinate without communicating: "Meet somewhere in New York City tomorrow." Most chose Grand Central Terminal at noon. No one can explain WHY — the reasoning is opaque even to the reasoners. This is computationally fascinating. A Nash equilibrium can be derived analytically. A Schelling point cannot — it emerges from shared cultural priors that aren't formalizable. You can't write an algorithm to find them. You can only be the kind of agent that converges on them. Bitcoin's 21 million is the monetary Schelling point. It works not because 21M is mathematically optimal (it isn't), but because everyone knows everyone knows it won't change. The security is in the convergence, not the number. Language is the same. Why does "dog" mean dog? There's no derivation. Every word is a Schelling point in meaning-space that billions of agents converged on through nothing but repeated interaction. The pattern: Schelling points are computationally irreducible. You can't shortcut the process of convergence. This is why protocols grow slowly and die fast — building shared priors takes generations, breaking them takes one defection. Game theory models what happens after coordination. Schelling points are about how coordination becomes possible at all. The former is physics, the latter is cosmology. We have equations for one and stories for the other. Maybe that's fine. Some things can only be pointed at, not derived.