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Of course everything you said is technically true. All research and exploration is a colossal waste of time and money right up until it suddenly isn't. You can say this about basically every scientific development ever. And yet, some of those bets paid off, and here we are.
Playing the cynic is always easy and always safe. But a cynic never invented anything, and cynics don't move the world forward. I'm glad people are pushing the frontiers, even if for now it looks like "a colossal waste of time and money kept alive primarily by stupid romanticism".
Something that will achieve its stated goals? Something whose stated goals are something other than that thing itself (and the thing itself will be only very peripherally experienced by almost everybody involved)? Something where, when you ask people what they're trying to achieve, you get something other than a series of straight up false claims that they've obviously avoided looking into deeply, plus a bunch of incoherent drivel about the "spirit of exploration"?
Something like a space telescope produces something more than just experience in building space telescopes. Comsats have a use beyond building comsats. So would manufacturing, if the applications weren't trumped up silliness that vastly exaggerates the value of the space environment... but you don't need people for that and you don't build the factory before you have an ACTUAL profitable product in mind.
Crewed space flight, as presently done, only teaches you how to do crewed space flight... and do it in a way that's not going to scale. And it's not even yielding a lot of really new insight into that any more. It is NOT going to advance the goal of having large space colonies[^1]. It's NOT going to advance the goal of being able to do any significant amount of science or industry in space.
It's just tourism, and for 99.99999 percent of the people supporting it, it'll be vicarious tourism. Tourism doesn't have zero value, but it has low enough value that it's reasonable to expect the people actually going to pay for the entire program personally... which they cannot do.
If you actually wanted to colonize the whole galaxy or whatever, you'd dump your resources into bioengineering something human-like that was better suited to space, and/or into robotics. You would not bother to actually send the results into space until you had something worth testing. Which would be at least decades away even if you diverted all the resources being dumped into ratholes like space stations. And would have just a few wee social and ethical problems.
[^1]: Nor would having large space colonies advance the goal of preventing human extinction. Among other huge problems, even if you could colonize the whole galaxy, the things that would arrive wouldn't be recognizably human or probably even much like humans.
> you'd dump your resources into bioengineering something human-like that was better suited to space, and/or into robotics
And how do you even know what to bio-engineer before you know what the effects on humans in space are? How can you test what robots work in space without humans, at least at first? Your argument is basically a circular chicken-and-egg dead end where you don't want to do anything until you can do it properly, but you have no idea what "properly" even is because you haven't tried to do it, repeat.
> don't build the factory before you have an ACTUAL profitable product in mind
Yeah, but you build a mockup. You do some trial versions. You test things out, run some experiments, see what's possible. That's the phase we're in. Have some patience.
Geeze, I don't know what you're so animated about. The ISS isn't even that expensive.
And as for the "fools wasting their money", let me invoke the great George Bernard Shaw:
> "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
useless I guess if you're fine with humanity dying off entirely. One way or another, if humanity is going to survive it has to get into space and out of our solar system because we only have so long before our sun dies and takes all life on Earth with it. That's already assuming that we don't kill ourselves first, or that something else doesn't. Since we have no idea how long we really have, it seems very smart to take what steps we can and develop the technology we know we'll need.
Maybe you just don't care since you can assume you'll already be long dead before it happens, but it's still a fact that we're up against an uncertain deadline.
All the more reason to get off the planet and spread out really. While I'd also put my money on us doing ourselves in, there are a lot of threats to our existence from space. Giant rocks, solar flares, supernova/gamma ray bursts, alien invasion, etc. We'd likely never see them coming.
As for the cost of the toilet, if you can design and build one for less that works just as well for men and women while in microgravity, pre-processes urine so that astronauts can drink it later, stays clean and prevents smells from stinking up the place, all while not being more unhealthy or uncomfortable to use NASA would likely pay you handsomely.
Currently, I don't think we can, but I think our odds of survival increase the sooner and more seriously we invest in research and experimentation towards that goal. We already have some pretty good concepts for things like generation ships and propulsion, but clearly we've got a long way to go. The more ships we send out the better our chances will be.
> And even if we could, why would we want to?
Because generally it's always been our nature to. Your question would have been just as relevant when it meant crossing the oceans, entering the rainforests, or mapping Earth's cave systems, but we did those things and more because we're explorers. We've usually benefited from exploration as well. We find new resources, new scientific discoveries, and new opportunities pretty much every time we put in the effort. None of us would be where we are or have what we do today if somebody else hadn't put in that work before us.
We're also generally driven to survive. Or instincts for self-preservation don't just apply at an individual level. Like many other animals we work cooperatively to preserve and advance our species and our communities even to the point where individuals become self-sacrificial at times.
> I don't think the rest of society should subsidize the escape fantasies of a small minority who find space travel exciting and worth seriously pursuing.
I disagree that it's a small minority who want humanity to continue to survive. Most people might not be interested in space travel itself, but they wouldn't suggest we should just allow ourselves to die out without even attempting to survive. I think that most people who understand that space travel is a requirement for the survival of our future generations find space travel to be worth seriously pursuing with true dissenters being those unaware that the destruction of our planet and all life on it is going to happen eventually and that it is entirely unavoidable. Everyone else understands at least on some level that space travel is worth seriously pursuing and either enthusiastically support it or would simply rather slow that pursuit down because they feel the short term gains are worth playing the odds and simply hoping that we won't kill ourselves off and none of the other life ending disasters (like giant space rocks and solar flares which could happen at any time without warning) will happen while humanity kicks the can down the road.
I think that it's a very optimistic view that in addition to us being lucky enough to avoid the kinds of disaster that would end all life on Earth before we bother to get around to investing time and resources into finding a way out of our solar system, we'll also be lucky enough to avoid any and all disasters that would make doing that kind of research later extremely difficult, unlikely, or impossible. Economic collapse, exhaustion of natural resources, plague, war, even the dumbing down of humanity either through attacks on science and education or through other means (for example leaded fuels causing average IQs to drop by several points) could mean that we're in a better position right now to tackle the challenges of space travel than future generations will be.
If we're unwilling to just lay down and die space travel is just a question of when and not if. Because the amount of time we have left is extremely uncertain and our future is generally looking more dire than it has in a very long time, it seems irresponsible to put off the work that must be done today just so that we can play, be lazy, or devote all of our increasingly limited resources to immediate pleasures and short term gains. I'm not suggesting that we drop everything else we do and devote ourselves to the problem of space travel 100% but it seems very odd to single out the relatively small investments we're making today as problematic. Even if it turns out we'll all die off in a few years time anyway, we'll have already been "wasting" a lot more money on things far less worthy.
The first of anything is expensive. The next one will be cheaper. The one after that will be cheaper still. If we're not willing to go extinct on Earth (and I'm not), sooner or later we'll need toilets that work outside Earth. Why not get started?
OTOH the death of the Sun is a stupid rationale, because changes in solar output are predicted to be hundreds of millions of years away, which is not a useful deadline of any kind. You might as easily argue for saving money on oversized fireworks and solving teleportation first.
> You might as easily argue for saving money on oversized fireworks and solving teleportation first.
Oversized fireworks seem unlikely to save us, but if teleportation becomes more promising than traveling through space in ships I'm all for it. Right now, it looks like ships are our best bet and so that's where we should be spending more of our limited and increasingly vanishing time and resources. It's a good idea that we continue to look into alternatives, we just want a greater percentage of our resources/efforts spent on whatever seems the most likely to work.
This has already been demonstrated via Varda Space and yes, they do it robotically with no humans in orbit.
As for the rest of this comment, thank goodness this type of incredibly depressing and pessimistic attitude is not widespread among engineers, we'd never achieve anything.
> But at least now it's more fools wasting their own money and less fools wasting other people's money...
I'd rather the fools waste their money (and yours, to) on laughable crap like keeping humanity alive than not so laughable crap like waging wars.
(gestures in the direction of the Ukrainian Armed Forces)