[jessriedel]

That's actually exactly my philosophy [1]. I agree with each of your examples (water on mars, photos of Pluto, early-universe cosmology). Nonetheless, the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is in a completely different league. The random guys on the street will not only care about this tremendously, he will care for the same correct reasons that scientists care.

[1] Minus the part about it being a waste of taxes; just because people aren't interested doesn't mean it's not worthwhile, because people can be wrong.

[nicboobees]

So we find out there's some creatures on Pluto that are roughly the same as frogs. How does that impact anyones life? It'd be an interesting fact, and maybe fun if we could move some over here as pets, but beyond that, it's a colossal waste of energy and money.

[jessriedel]

Do you mean impacting their life materially? Why would it have to impact their life materially to be valuable? Sharing a joke with a friend at a bar doesn't have material benefit, but it's one of the valuable things in life.

[nicboobees]

If you're going to force people to pay money, through taxes, grants etc, to explore space, then it should have some material benefit.

[jessriedel]

That's a pretty unusual axiom that most people don't subscribe to, and it's orthogonal to disagreements over justifications for involuntary taxes.

[mratzloff]

Well, presumably any civilization advanced enough to communicate with us wouldn't be interested in being our pets. Civilization being sort of a prerequisite of communicating with us?

If you can't see how that would be one of the most impactful things in human history, I don't think there's any more to discuss.