[roymurdock]

We needed to beat the russians to the moon, it was part of the cold war effort, as much as I agree with these ideals they need to be tempered in reality and politics. We have no comparable political need for space exploration today.

[robbiep]

Unless you’re concerned about us as a species not making it out of the local minima of the comfort of earth before an extinction level event wipes us out. Which, fair enough, most politicians aren’t.

[roymurdock]

We are so, so far away from being able to leave earth and terraform/colonize other planets. A better argument is that we might find new technology or make new observations that help raise the standard of living on earth through designing to the requirements of space survival and exploration. But it's hard to translate potential ROI into spending when there are much more pressing problems here on earth.

[nwah1]

Not true. We've had sufficient technology for a long time. We've been sending robots to Mars for decades.

We just haven't made it an objective to terraform Mars. We've even been quite cautious about avoiding even the possibility of transporting microbes there and "contaminating" it.

But the basic mechanics of how to terraform are known. Elon Musk mentioned nuking the poles of Mars as an option. Changing the gas composition could be done, albeit slowly, with enough resources and motivation. You can send robots in advance of human settlers to prepare things.

Self-replicating robots would be more ideal, and that is not a solved problem, but you could likely build partially self-replicating robots that are replenished with "vitamins" much like how the RepRap project does.

Various NASA theorists have written about such things

http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/