I admire the imagination and chutzpah of Musk and his fellow billionaires. But this whole enterprise is delusional in the extreme. We are nowhere near solving a global predicament that gets worse with every passing day: the steady erosion of our global biological support system due to ever-increasing CO2 emissions and ecocidal expansion of the human footprint—as if we were not actually as dependent on our global ecosystems as every other living organism. When southern latitudes become uninhabitable due to extreme heat and humidity; when monocultural crop lands turn to deserts and tropical pathogens move north; when melting pack ice at both poles and on every mountain flood coastal cities while drying up water in the rivers and watersheds fed by these glaciers…these fantasies of space colonization will shrivel and die. Our fantasies about “terraforming” the moon and Mars (and hey—why not Jupiter and Neptune as well??) would better be directed at healing the damage we’ve already inflicted on our own home planet!