(August 29, 2022 at 7:34 pm)Fireball Wrote: Spending on space supports highly skilled jobs, fuels technology advancements with practical applications, and creates business opportunities that feed back into the economy. This in turn grows the pool of public money that can be spent on solving the world's most pressing problems.
I get that but still not the point. It is a matter of priorities. I will always support things like unmanned space probes, which are far less complicated, less expensive and require just as much skill to make, but with far less risk to the probe.
But right now, we need to focus on using those same talented people, to solve issues of cleaning up our oceans, inventing better and more affordable clean energy, and ending deforestation, famine, and education.
Even when we do, and we will eventually get a human, or a few humans on Mars, it still would be impossible or take hundreds or or thousands of years to make efficient daily launches of mass numbers of humans to get to Mars to populate it.
But even if I am being optimistic right now our species is far to tribal and exploitive to collectively make those things possible. We have a far better chance of a nuclear war than colonizing Mars right now.
