So we're landing another rover on Mars as I write this, Perseverance.

It's falling through Mars' tenuous atmosphere right now.

Some make the argument NASA and all other development in space is a waste when there is suffering on Earth--there are problems to solve here.

This is wrong for a lot of reasons.

One of which is human life on Earth is unsustainable no matter what we do and no matter how you examine it.

There is no sustaining the population we have without developing the technologies and resources of space.

And I don't mean that in the very long-term.

I mean that in the next few generations.

Asteroid mining is not a far-distant necessity. It's something that necessary to start developing in the century or billions of humans will die as our global civilization collapses.

The reasons are complex and convoluted and beyond the scope of this thread, but it's something I and others have written about before and, suffice to say, it's a thing.

That's not even the only reason, mind.

There are threats to not developing space.

The weather of the Sun is a threat to us. If we do not monitor it, it can wipe out our industry and infrastructure in a flash.

Meanwhile, our communications and meteorological infrastructures depend heavily on space technology, obviously.

There are other arguments to be made for developing space in that as more resources become available to us, particularly those in the production of high-efficiency solar panels, we might not need "difficult" technologies like fusion.

So about that argument developing space is a waste, though.

In the 2019 budget? About .5% of the US budget went to NASA.

That is, however, not the only major expense on "long-term" technologies America has, we also have the Department of Energy.

In 2019? The DOE got about .7% of the total budget.

Now the DOE covers a lot of things, including oil and natural gas development, a certain amount of military and defense work, only some of that is research and laboratory work.

The most generous number for that is .33%.

The United States is not leaving people to starve or lose out on healthcare because we're sending people and robots into space.

In fact, we're not even sending people into space anymore.

We've been cutting our space and laboratory research budgets.

We did so before Trump.

There is no reason a functional society cannot ensure both its future and its present.

One might argue a society being unable to plan for the long-term future and solve the problems of the present are fundamentally the same issue.