And? Building bases on the moon, mars, or the asteroid belt doesn't require terraforming, anymore than living on an Antarctic base through winter requires the ability to farm for food, and wear a bikini.
We spent $700 billion a year on the defense budget, and $7 trillion on wars, $1 billion on inspiring stunts like moon landings or mars landings once a generation, are not really a waste, the money is mostly spent on earth, dual use technology comes out of it, and it opens the possibility of space tourism, not to mention just cheaper launch capabilities (driven by the need to send a million tons to Mars) also benefit building a better space-based asteroid/comet defense system too.
>We spent $700 billion a year on the defense budget, and $7 trillion on wars, $1 billion on inspiring stunts like moon landings or mars landings once a generation, are not really a waste
That's because they are framed as a more immediate existential threat. Humans are present biased and don't like to spend lots of money on low-probability events until they are unavoidable (see: attitudes towards pandemic preparations in 2019).
Actually we don’t fix stuff as a species until people start dying. How long it takes is how much bad PR is involved. Avoiding that bad PR instead of solving the problem is an art that we have become better at than solving problems.
Yup. Paul Krugman once said something to the effect that the human race would benefit from an Alien Invasion, because the way things are going, we don't invest in the planet, we don't unify and put aside petty grievances and selfishness, until there's a unified enemy.
If an actual high probability ELE asteroid collision was detected, people would get their shit together real quick. Or maybe not, the COVID crisis has shattered my faith. I'm sure a bunch of people would claim the asteroid prediction is a NASA scam to install socialism or something.
We spent $700 billion a year on the defense budget, and $7 trillion on wars, $1 billion on inspiring stunts like moon landings or mars landings once a generation, are not really a waste, the money is mostly spent on earth, dual use technology comes out of it, and it opens the possibility of space tourism, not to mention just cheaper launch capabilities (driven by the need to send a million tons to Mars) also benefit building a better space-based asteroid/comet defense system too.