[MereInterest]

I see it not as escapism, but as steps to learn how to take care of a limited resource. Large-scale geoengineering will be necessary sooner or later on Earth. However, it almost certainly has failure modes that we don't know about, and won't know about until we can experiment with it. Testing the effects on Earth, with nearly 8 billion people, is wildly reckless. Testing the effects on Mars or Venus, though costlier to implement, has the advantage of not risking those 8 billion lives.