What he's really saying in this opinion piece is that he doesn't care a whit about evidence, and isn't interested enough in his fellow human beings to try to persuade them with careful reasoning. I was second to none in cheering on the Space Race when it was happening. I was taking a summer course on planetary astronomy, a special program of my school district, with the classmate who became my lifelong best friend during the summer when the first Moon landing happened. We were both fans of the space program and aspired to be astronauts. Our school district's school board voted that summer what to name the new high school: Neil Armstrong Senior High, of course. So I'm an alumnus of a school named after Neil Armstrong.
Humankind has set foot on the Moon. Humankind has sent space probes to other bodies in the Solar System, and has collected and returned samples from a few of those, with Mars next in consideration. But meanwhile lots of young Baby Boomers who grew up watching members of the Greatest Generation or the Silent Generation becoming public heros by voyaging into outer space have discovered that there are challenging, tough problems to solve right here on Earth.
I have mentioned before here on HN that in the school year just before the Moon landing, my classmates and I built a time capsule with our predictions of the year 2001. The time capsule was opened that year. Our predictions largely proved too pessimistic, although they included a lot of gee-whiz technological predictions. Pollution was less of a problem, worldwide, than we predicted for 2001, and petroleum was more plentiful and less expensive.
The world gets wake-up calls every day. Every day people face problems. Life is full of problems. The way to have excitement in life is to be excited about grappling with and perhaps solving problems. That's even more cool than being stacked on top of a column of explosive chemicals to be pushed into orbit. People can float more freely than they float in microgravity when they free their minds to be imaginative about how to solve problems. If exploring space some more solves real problems for real people, some people will be willing to pay to send other people into outer space. But mostly people will be most willing to pay for what appears to have genuine utility, and there are plenty of exciting, risky, and challenging things to do right here on the ground that are likely to have higher priority than manned space exploration for most people for a long, long time.
More accurately there is a different reason to do things. Remember that no one is compelled to go on the missions. We don't know what we don't know. Humans are naturally curious and natural explorers - look at what happened in the late 15th and 16th centuries. The various voyages that are celebrated (eg Columbus) were definitely not made based on evidence! There was a 90% mortality rate on the first British settlements in the US in that timeframe. At the beginning of the 20th century we had mad dashes for the poles. (They could and sometimes did fly over them which is "better" based on evidence.) In the middle of the century some people got to the top of Mt Everest and came back again - again pointless about the evidence. Lots of people died in these explorations. I think it is just fine encouraging people to explore. The only valid question is how much to subsidise it via tax payer's money. To put it into perspective in the US: "The entire running budget of NASA since it's inception in 1958 adds up to $526.18 billion. That's about $173 billion less than the 2008 bank bailout."
As for your pollution etc issues, it really is worth looking into the facts. From Matt Ridley's Rational Optimist: "When I was a student here in Oxford in the 1970s, the future of the world was bleak. The population explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. A cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was going to shorten our lives. The acid rain was falling on the forests. The desert was advancing by a mile or two a year. The oil was running out, and a nuclear winter would finish us off. None of those things happened, (Laughter) and astonishingly, if you look at what actually happened in my lifetime, the average per-capita income of the average person on the planet, in real terms, adjusted for inflation, has tripled. Lifespan is up by 30 percent in my lifetime. Child mortality is down by two-thirds. Per-capita food production is up by a third. And all this at a time when the population has doubled."
http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.htm...
There will be human ground-level problems (poverty, mental illness, education, etc) to solve right up until the point where the Earth is no more (or is at least non-human-habitable). The Earth is temporary. Becoming less dependent on it as a species is going to be a very, very long process. We can't wait until we solve every human problem* to start.
* Spoiler alert: We will never solve every human problem. Ever.
It's a damn good thing the Wright Brothers didn't say the same thing. There were a lot of problems right down on the ground when they built their aircraft too. They should have been working on something with genuine utility!
It's about dreams. It's about stretching the boundaries. It's about reaching for more, not merely shuffling the pieces we already have.
Here's an alternate way to look at it- When's the right time to start a startup? When all your personal problems are solved? When will that be, exactly?
I'm bothered more by not having bullet trains (in America) and hypersonic jets. If you compare getting 2 dozen people to Mars vs building futuristic cities, transportation, etc., I think humanity will benefit much more if we bring 7 billion people into the future.
Just imagine, for example, a kid in the slums of Rio studying online to earn her degree from a future version of Udacity, after which she finds a job in London so she jumps on a plane for the 2 hour flight. After a year, she buys an apartment 100 miles outside and commute 30 minutes every day to work by maglev. With hypersonic flight she can fly home for long weekends to visit her family...
In short, the point let's first invest in making our world smaller and educate more people so more people come online to help contribute in some meaningful way.
"There's no point having a great civilization if all we do is sit on our little rock and just survive."
[1] http://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-a...
The iconic vision of moon project is the American flag. If that doesn't suggest that it was more about politics that progress, I do not know what will.
On the other hand, today were are focusing our space exploration resources as efficiently as we can, sending small rovers to do research, cooperating internationally instead of duplicating effort, ETC.
Once we learn enough to make a long-term colony feasible (or run into some barrier that requires human presence to solve), it is simply a waste of resources.
Besides, we have a continues human presence in space, I consider that far more impressive than a couple of visits to the moon, or Mars.
