[unethical_ban]

I see this argument enough that I will need to make a form response.

Humans should gain the ability to live off this planet sustainably. If we don't work on that now, then when?

We gain understanding of the human body and of numerous technologies through the novelties and challenges of human spaceflight.

The idea of pushing out civilization forward physically through space is an inspiration for engineers and explorers of all kinds. Even if a child doesn't end up being an astronaut, they end up more curious than if we only sent rovers. Because we are human.

It just seems sadly cynical to hear people think "there is no utility to human exploration".

[tzs]

> Humans should gain the ability to live off this planet sustainably. If we don't work on that now, then when?

I'd go farther and say humans must gain the ability to live off this planet sustainably, and eventually out of this solar system, if humanity is to survive long term.

However, just because a problem must be solved for humanity to survive doesn't necessarily mean any effort should be spent now on it.

Sometimes a problem is so far beyond current technology and theory that instead of having your best people spend their lives trying to make tiny advances toward solving it you are better off if they work on things that can actually be solved now, and in a few decades or centuries our general level of technology and theory will have advanced enough that the work that took our best people their whole careers to accomplish will be something that would be a decent homework problem in college.

[kjkjadksj]

Surgery is important but was the work of the medieval surgeon experimenting on corpses really relevant to the modern understanding of medicine? Probably not when they were concerned with the source of the four humors or whatever it was, and had zero concept of germ theory much less cellular biology. We are spending too much money and effort on process that will no doubt be obviated with a future technology. We are still very far from having a sustainable method for human settlement and colonization, and having people poop in bags on the iss probably isn’t advancing much understanding in those technologies beyond what terrestrial experiments and simulation could do.

[inglor_cz]

"Surgery is important but was the work of the medieval surgeon experimenting on corpses really relevant to the modern understanding of medicine?"

It actually sort-of was, because slow aggregation of knowledge about anatomy helped undermine a lot of the old Galenic dogmas.