[asdflkj]

He's right about the Moon landing being a stunt. But the Mars settlement will also be a stunt. Curing aging--that'd be historic. Creating a drug that will make us all happy and compassionate would be historic. Creating a "first world" country in the middle of an ocean where everyone in the world is welcome, as long as they obey the law and create wealth.

Space travel for our civilization is like a poor person putting gold-planted rims on his shitty car. Evolutionary theory has explanations for this sort of behavior.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle

[dstorrs]

> Space travel for our civilization is like a poor person putting gold-planted rims on his shitty car.

Well, that's one (wrong) way of putting it. I suspect you may be trolling, but here's some reasons that we might /want/ to pursue space travel:

1) Right now, all of humanity's eggs live in one basket -- literally. One large asteroid strike, sufficiently virulent pandemic, nuclear war, etc, would wipe out our species. Planting a self-sustaining colony on a non-Earth body fixes that.

2) A self-sustaining orbital technology (necessary for a colony) would allow us to build enough solar power satellites to give everyone on Earth enough clean, cheap energy for the next thousand years.

3) Putting a large chunk of our manufacturing on the Moon or in orbit would allow us to reduce the environmental impact of industry.

By the way..."a drug that would make us all happy and compassionate"? Huxley called it "soma", and I would not want to live in the Brave New World.

[asdflkj]

Huxley is sci-fi and not reality, and so are your reasons. If you want to avoid a pandemic, invest heavily in biotech. If you want clean energy, invest in nuclear plants and more efficient energy storage and such. If you want to avoid a nuclear war, invest in infrastructure that will allow the world's poor to create wealth and raise their standard of living and not want to kill anybody.

By instead dumping all those billions into space exploration, you are actively raising the chance of something terrible happening here on Earth, this "basket" whose destruction you consider so nonchalantly.