Actually an interesting essay I liked, and not what I expected from the title. I don't know if this is intentional, but the title led me to expect the opposite

Actually an interesting essay I liked, and not what I expected from the title. I don't know if this is intentional, but the title led me to expect the opposite of the author's final sentance (kind of irrelevant to the rest of the piece) conclusion. > Maybe that’s actually the most compelling reason to settle Mars and beyond. So that there is, actually, a planet B to draw inspiration from. I hope everyone knows by now, the amount of investment it would take to make Mars at all liveable -- still far less comfortable than, say, antarctica -- by humans is enormous and would span generations, if it's possible at all which quite likely is not. Far far more resources, orders of magnitude, than the amount it would take to deal with climate change and keep the actual earth liveable, which we already seem to think is out of our means. Like even in our worst nightmares of climate change it's probably still easier to live on earth than on Mars no matter how much we put into Mars. Here's just one the first thing found googling that looked reasonable explaining this: https://lasp.colorado.edu/mop/files/2019/08/Humans-Will-Never-Colonize-Mars.pdf https://lasp.colorado.edu/mop/files/2019/08/Humans-Will-Neve... There really is no plan(et) B for earth. Which is the argumetn I associated the "there is no planet b" title with, which perhaps the author was intending to play on? To the extent that people's fantasies of it take away any urgency at all to trying to keep earth from getting less liveable, it's pretty infuriating.