When founders allocate an inordinate amount of board meeting time to explaining their “Plan B” if things don’t work out, I’ve been known to growl something along the lines of, “Every hour you spend thinking about Plan B means one fewer hour focused on achieving Plan A.”

Don’t get me wrong. Contingency planning is the mark of every good business manager. I want the companies into which we invest to act as responsible stewards of our capital.

The Plan B vs Plan A allocation trade-off appears these days in the efforts to enable the human colonization of Mars, and this is where my grumpy feeling resurfaces.

I applaud the ambitions of technology billionaires and futurists to aim toward lofty goals, and I too am seduced by the appeal of exploration and adventure. However, rather than working on “Planet B,” I wonder if it might make more sense to channel all this collective ingenuity, capital, and mental bandwidth toward saving Planet A.

Anyway, this is what I’m thinking about today, Earth Day 2019.

Happy Earth Day everyone.