Society has accomplished a ton due to the space race. Furthermore, just because we haven't put humans anywhere doesn't mean we haven't explored anywhere. We have a robot on Mars, had a robot on Venus. We have ships nearing the end of our solar system and sending data back. We have learned tons, and keep learning tons, and have used all of this knowledge to make life on earth better. GPS alone is worth it, let alone everything we've done.
Putting more men on the moon does us absolutely no good besides letting a country puff its chest out more.
While that certainly would be awesome, I'm pretty sure you meant "solar system".
We actually have more than that; in addition to Curiosity, the Opportunity rover is (by some miracle) still in active service and fully operational.
I feel a lot of the return on spacefaring is as simple as making groups of humans, a long way from each other, work together because of shared interests.
Which of these do you think would generate outrage? Axing the moonshot, or defunding an experimental thruster research program?
Doing cool stuff might not be the most efficient way to do research, but it's a hell of a lot better than nothing, and it inspires generations.
I mean, honestly I'm not so sure what the huge rush is to expand to another planet when we're having so much trouble with just one.
It's not that I don't want to see us move past the boundaries of this planet, but on the list of things I'd want to see before my time is up on this planet, there's plenty of things like the end of world hunger or bringing the poorest people in the world to an infinitely better standard of living that come way before us living on another planet.
In the very long term moving to another planet is a way to stave off the end of our species (amongst other positive things), but in the very very long term the odds are we won't live on indefinitely, I think improving the lives of those who come before now and that time is probably the most worthwhile thing we can do.
Not really. Solving the propulsion and energy generation problems would have done that, but not merely sending a bunch more people to a space rock for a few days using chemical rockets. EMDrive is interesting if it works, but significantly more efficient energy generation still eludes us.
