The issues Donald Trump and I can find to agree on are few. I know this makes us both sad. Some people mock him for gorging himself on multiple Big Macs and Filets-o-Fish, but this is actually my favorite thing about him. I understand he likes elephants. And as of Monday, it turns out we agree on a third thing: sending human beings back to the moon, and to Mars.

It’s an insane proposal, of course, and I don’t believe the president really means it any more than he means to build his wall — he has probably forgotten saying it already and will deny it if asked. I don’t even think going back to the moon is a good idea, per se; there’s not much there, unless there are any Easter-egg monoliths waiting for us. It doesn’t make much sense as a jumping-off point for Mars or a training ground for deep-space travel, and to quote President Barack Obama: “I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before.” No offense to the moon, but it’s boring; it doesn’t inspire anymore.

I also don’t subscribe to Stephen Hawking’s notion that we need to get off this planet and establish a viable human population elsewhere lest we go extinct. I tend to side with Kim Stanley Robinson, author of a trilogy about the colonization of Mars, who in his more recent book “Aurora” portrays the dream of extraterrestrial colonization as a dangerous escapist fantasy — dangerous because it lets us imagine that we have an out, that we can just ditch this planet after we’ve ruined it instead of grappling with the imminent, serious, possibly terminal problems here, the only homeworld we’re ever going to get.

I don’t support going to Mars for practical reasons at all. I think we should plan to go to Mars because it would be a healthy sign that we, as a civilization, are still planning for a future — that we intend to live. Because right now, frankly, we’re not acting as though we do. We’re acting more the way a friend of mine did in the last year of his life: letting the mail pile up unopened, heaping garbage in the house, littering the floor with detritus, no longer bothering to turn over the calendar pages. He’d clearly decided, on some level, to die.