Dr. Robert Zubrin with a brilliant answer to "Why Should We Go To Mars?"

Yep. There's a great video of Dr. Robert Zubrin (author of "The Case For Mars") answering the why question of going to Mars: [this video] One of his points is the effect that space exploration has on kids. It excites them. It makes them want to be explorers too. Kids are full of imagination, they hear about people on another world and they imagine themselves doing it too. It happened with the moon landings, and it inspired kids to become scientists and technologists and to follow their own paths to exploration. edit: despite being born too late to be mesmerized by the moon landings in real-time, I was one of those kids. I started playing with computers and writing my first programs when I was 8. I watched a lot of Star Trek and James Doohan's Scotty was my favorite character. There was a picture of Neil Armstrong on my wall. I got "Odyssey" magazines and had a book that artistically imagined what life might be like elsewhere in the solar system that I read until, literally, the cover fell off. I had an audio cassette that took you on a wild ride through the solar system. The hope of exploring space someday is what drew me into technology. So many years later, and I only use that technology to have arguments with other people over whether exploration is "worth it" at all. How's that for some weltschmerz?

The person I responded to, in the part that I quoted, brought up people without electricity and plumbing as a contrast to spending efforts on exploration. It looks like an either/or to me. > People are simply arguing against spending more on it when we have more pressing issues to contend with. But this argument happens every time the issue of funding space exploration comes up. Every single time. Without fail. Not a single time is there a proposed NASA budget without part of the discussion devolving into, "why don't we just hand the money out to the poor instead?" Not a single time do the risks and costs of SpaceX, or a new satellite, or the rovers, or the ISS, or other efforts get discussed without someone saying, "but cancer..." This is a line of thinking which scrutinizes every single dollar spent on exploration. Left unchallenged, it would eventually halt all spending on exploration altogether. I, and a lot of other people -- like the person at the top of this thread -- believe that exploring Mars is not just worthwhile, it's necessary, in spite of the many other people on Earth who have more immediate needs. Dr. Robert Zubrin argued that case far more eloquently than I could: [this video]

When I hear these kind of "why go to space if we have people dying of hunger here on earth?" kind of arguments I always refer them to the amazing speech Robert Zubrin gave on the answer for "why go to Mars?": [this video] The idea is that: "We’d get millions of scientists, engineers, and inventors, technological entrepreneurs, doctors, medical researchers out of that (going to mars), and the intellectual capital from that would enormously benefit us" I do believe of course that all things should be done - we should do the best we can to first save our planet. But that doesn't mean we should stop doing the rest of the "pushing the envelope" kind of things.