Apollo45

[Glaucus]

Personally I think we should be looking longer term and doing the things now to set things in place to start leaving the planet and moving outwards rather than leaving it to the point were the planet's eco-system has been damaged to the point that it causes a collapse in society.

The other thing people forget is technology is a progression, you stop researching and technology stalls. You can't then in hundred years just build something massively better than we have now.

Look at reaction engines limited, which are developing sabre engines for a space plane.
However these engines could be used for cheap supersonic passenger flight, military are also super interested. But you can't just get to that stage in one leap. It's taken decades of rocket technology, then decades on the interchanger.

If you just stop funding, we would hover have got to where we are, where private companies are starting to take over from governments. But if governments never spent that money in the first place, you wouldn't have the private companies now.

 

[Glaucus]

Which is fine, not everyone can or should be interested in everything. You should be able to see benefits though.

NASA has a whole page of spinoffs, created by space exploration. Many of which you will use or know off. Things like ear temperature probes are thanks to human space exploration. Fire resistant polymers thanks to Apollo mission.
And thousands of others. Hundreds of medical items, thanks to the human research on board the iss.
Like your scratch resistant glass? First developed by nasa.

NASA has a spinoff website, which lists most of their spinoff technology for every year for decades. http://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff/database/