How did the Star Trek "Enterprise" communicate across the galaxy? I don't remember any specific mention of a method, though I guess today they'd say something about "quantum entanglement" or similar....
The Erlang practice of letting things fail is also SOP for experienced implementors of any large SOA system. You just let things fail. If some process getting messages from a queue can't talk to the Database, don't retry; just exit and let the supervisor deal with it.
Erlang is great for writing robust software because this type of error handling is a first-class feature of the language and runtime.