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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dire Bare" data-source="post: 9887607" data-attributes="member: 18182">I'm not arguing against funding crewed and robotic space flight, but . . .Yes, we spend plenty of money on our problems here on Earth. But enough? It's not really about the amount of money spent (money is fiction), but HOW that money is spent. There's a lot of corruption and incompetence in human governments, reducing the effectiveness of the money we spend.That is also true of our space programs, although at least there the folks doing the work tend to be pretty smart, passionate, and motivated. But politics, corruption, and incompetence definitely play a role here also. Wherever you find humans . . .The pushback is against techbros like Musk and Zuckerberg who are "futurists" pushing for colonization of Mars . . . when that will never be a viable prospect. At least not before we bake our own planet and make the whole problem moot.You do point out some of the very real possibilities of our space programs that can benefit life here on Earth. But none of it is as important as changing how we care for the environment itself. I'm not sure we have the time to develop Lagrange point colonies or asteroid mining before we deplete necessary resources here, flood the coasts, and bake our brains in the heat . . .But I do want NASA and other space agencies to keep on doing what they are doing. We can do both. Well, not Mars, but all that other stuff.</blockquote>