No that is an absolutely terrible way of thinking about ANYTHING. That is what the townspeople said to the aristocrat funding development of the microscope. They demanded he care for the sick before engaging in this glass grinding business which had no obvious benefit
Yet the microscope proved to be the biggest advance in medicine. Nobody could have predicted that being able to look at really small things would have an impact on how we understand disease.
Likewise nobody could have predict the profound impact satellites have had on our economy and on science.
Space exploration brings technological progress. If you are concerned about waste of money then first start to worry about industries we spend far more money on 1) Gambling 2) Cosmetics 3) Weapons, bombs etc 4) Disposable fashion
Not to mention most of the worlds problems are of political nature. They are not problems a scientists can solve. Insisting that a physicist should apply his skills to create say world peace is a waste of skills and effort.
The microscope story a sibling comment mentioned is part of a 1970 letter from a then-NASA Director to a nun serving in Africa who asked the same question. I believe the full text is worth a read:
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html
I think space colonization is an even bigger fantasy than relying on "future tech" that will magically terraform the earth and reverse climate change. We can have a tiny structure housing 10 or 20 people somewhere in our solar system for the price of millions of pounds of fuel and billions of dollars.
Inter-system travel will never happen. Forums like this tend to have a healthy population of the sci-fi minded, so it won't be a popular opinion here, but the laws of physics simply rule it out. And the "men once thought they couldn't fly" argument doesn't carry water with me. We know a lot more about what we don't know now than we did then
Nevermind the hocus pocus, and I agree as far as "travel", but all that's really needed for (fairly dystopian attempts at) space colonization is surely artificial wombs?
Which aren't far off.
We don't need to break the laws of physics, or have cryonics or singularity shit work out to eventually consume the universe. All the nodes will just be real isolated.
There will always be some mess on Earth and anywhere else human kind visits in the future. We are flawed. Let's dream about perfect, but settle for good enough.
That's like saying "let's first neatly reorganize all the files on these 700 harddrives before thinking about backups" when you can just do both.
Spending for space exploration is currently at a laughably low level, if countless people didn't manage to solve all our problems in the course of decades then adding a few billions of dollars won't do anything except make a few people even richer.
You're missing the point. Going to space puts us in very restrictive environments and situations that forces us to solve issues that we "can" just shrug away here on earth (meaning we move it to one or two generations down the line so it's not our problem anymore).
Yet the microscope proved to be the biggest advance in medicine. Nobody could have predicted that being able to look at really small things would have an impact on how we understand disease.
Likewise nobody could have predict the profound impact satellites have had on our economy and on science.
Space exploration brings technological progress. If you are concerned about waste of money then first start to worry about industries we spend far more money on 1) Gambling 2) Cosmetics 3) Weapons, bombs etc 4) Disposable fashion
Not to mention most of the worlds problems are of political nature. They are not problems a scientists can solve. Insisting that a physicist should apply his skills to create say world peace is a waste of skills and effort.