MM - Great post, even though I passionately disagree.

I have 2 responses to add to the (very good) stuff thats already been
said:

You continually speak of the danger of human space exploration as a
bad thing. I could not disagree more.

As a culture, we are becoming ever more complacent. Ever more sheep.
Ever more tied up in the irrational and insignificant peddling of day
to day life. Without a frontier to inspire us, humans are trapped
believing that the only thing significant is the here and now, the
mundane reality of their individual existences. Yes, religion and
faith does help somewhat to alleviate this... but I'm not sure it does
so in particularly helpful ways (forcing people to focus on life after
death, instead of caring about what they make of their life). Also,
for many of us, the religious of our childhood have simply failed to
live up to the level of intellectual scrutiny we were raised to apply
to the world around us.

Either way... The simple fact is, without frontier - without the
calling of the unknown, and the passion for bettering the human
condition, we as a species tend to get caught up instead in trivial
nonsense and abject terror. If there is nothing else than the here
and now, I will not and cannot risk doing that which might jeopardize
it... I must be safe! I must not expose myself to risk of any kind!
Not now! Not ever!

Look around you - look at how pathetic we've become. We measure our
cars by the number of airbags they have. We no longer teach our
children "look both ways before you cross the street", we tell them
"NEVER EVER EVER CROSS THE STREET!". We plead with our government to
oppress us, to take away our options in life lest we become deluded,
distracted, or otherwise unaware and make a bad choice.

The concept of personal responsibility, risk management, and the value
of experience over safety has all been tremendously skewed over the
past 60 years... and its something I attribute directly to the 'loss
of frontier'... When we're kids we dream... when I was a kid, I
dreamed of exploring space, no matter what the cost. I learned to
value a calling beyond myself and my own wellbeing - that of bettering
humanity... and I would still, tomorrow, volunteer on a mission to
mars even if my odds of survival were only 50:50... Hell, the
original new world explorers odds were nearly that good... how quickly
we forget the risks they faced while we live the rewards of those
risks.

Its pathetic. We're pathetic, and if we don't find a new frontier
soon, and allow those of us who still possess the explorers instinct
to go do their thing before the instinct itself goes extinct... I hold
zero hope for the future of the human race.

Humanistic philosophy aside... the other side of the coin for me is
the technical:

I think you severely underestimate the amount of engineering and
technology from NASA that has filtered down into our lives... Never
mind the computer that you are using currently (transistor technology
was designed as a replacement for vacuum tubes that were to heavy and
power hungry for spacecraft). As a Silicon Valley Engineer, I can
with virtual certainty tell you that was it not for NASA and the
technologies developed during Apollo, the entire Web revolution would
not have happened.

But hell, that's just an extreme example... It comes down the
engineering constraints. Engineering revolutions, while expensive,
generally come when they are put to rather extreme constraints, beyond
the general needs of day to day life... otherwise engineering tends to
be evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Spaceflight offers one
particular for am extreme engineering constraints...

The results of those engineering revolutions are often extremely
difficult to predict... but historically they've been pretty
spectacular... why not spend a fraction of our resources (and NASA
really is a fraction, compared to what we spend on farm subsidies, or
Iraq (not to mention the military, which does have a certain trickle-
down technological effect as well)... NASA is a relatively small
portion of the US budget... considering the potential for both long
term humanistic inspiration and short-term technical revolutions to
spin off from it, methinks its a wise, small, although comparatively
high-risk investment.