The Economic Morality of Space Exploration

Also known as, how I justify spending billions of dollars on space programs. This is a topic I've debated in my own head for a while. I'm a minimalist when it comes to governmental theory, so I've struggled with the idea of a national space agency and the huge amounts of money that get poured into it. In the end, I've come out pro-NASA (and it's not just because I want a job eventually).

The pros and cons of most government agencies get rehashed every election year, and when the economy is going down the drain this badly, a lot of people start looking to slash anything that doesn't benefit everybody in an obvious way. Here's my thinking:

1. Saving our behinds in the future. Honestly, no one knows right now what's happening with our planet, on multiple levels. Not to sound alarmist, but our climate is changing measurably within a single generation, the ice caps are melting, storms are getting larger and more violent, and our magnetic envelope is slowly but surely disintegrating. None of this is new in our planet's history, and if archeological evidence is correct, we're overdue for a lot of what's coming. But most of these changes have each been associated with the near- or utter extinction of the predominant species on the planet at the time, and we have no solid idea of the time scales upon which these events took place in the past. This is not very comforting for us (or dolphins, or mice, if you believe Douglas Adams).
   
   How does this justify our space program? Well, first there's the worst-case scenario, in which we have to evacuate the planet before it becomes the next Venus or Mars (depending on your preferred doomsday disaster). Space exploration teaches us the tricky bits of living elsewhere, so our homeworld exit isn't a strictly sink or swim situation. We could also learn how to nudge other worlds' climates into being habitable -- a la terraforming -- to make the adjustment easier for the non-astronaut population.
2. Learning how to save/preserve our own planet. Take a look around at how many things we use on Earth are from NASA. Seriously. Car seats, your cell phone camera, that crinkly foil-y blanket you keep in your trunk, even your Brita filter in your fridge all came from things developed by our national space labs (here and here are overviews of some more items). With a track record like that, the idea that they wouldn't learn and share strategies to help our planet by researching and exploring others is a little far-fetched. Terraforming Mars may take tens of thousands of years, but if we learn how to do it, we may be able to keep Earth from needing to be terraformed itself.
3. Soft power. Look, we're America. Designing and manufacturing things that go into space makes us look really good; we don't need a Cold War to justify shining up our soft power quotient. And it gives our people the opportunity to be part of something scientific in our country, which is an area that we are falling further and further behind in compared to developing nations. We need to strengthen our science base in both the public and private sectors, and show the world that we do more than just make movies featuring warp drives...we can build them (which will probably be my next blog post, since it's exciting me so much).
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