Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits? Couldn’t we do those things directly, without going there?
It seems to me that, today, those who have the money to spend on these endeavors would only do so if there were perceived short-term benefits to themselves. That means they plan to exploit the resources, or increase their own power somehow.
I know the good engineers that make this happen are doing it for the challenge and in the pursuit of knowledge, and I know that’s why we poors support it, but that doesn’t “pay the bills.” What is the motivation behind the money? Why are they really doing this?
For the billionaires talking about future settlements on Mars and the like, there isn’t a short term benefit to actually doing it. That’s why they aren’t investing heavily in realistic plans to colonize the solar system. They are investing in space, but in a much more limited capacity that mostly involves satellites, government contracts and maybe a little space tourism for rich people.
All the talk of taking humanity to other worlds is good PR, inflates stock prices, and feeds into their own egos. It’s a way of projecting the image of being a visionary and being able to claim that they’re building a brighter future for humanity, and taking credit for making sci-fi pipe dreams a reality.
There are potentially massive benefits to spreading out in the solar system. We currently have access to a single planet’s resources, and Earth didn’t vacuum up all the useful materials in the solar system when it formed. There are also resources which are more abundant in space like helium-3.
But that’s all long term stuff. We may eventually build a moon base that refuels ships which support asteroid mining operations, send robots to build industrial complexes on Mars, and even start the long process of terraforming Venus so that one day we can have a second habitable planet. But first we have to get to the point where just getting into space isn’t so monstrously expensive.
And even if we had a working space elevator tomorrow, there would still be a ton of technical hurdles to overcome before we could accomplish something new that actually helps pay for all of this stuff. There’s speculation and research, but don’t expect massive investments until we’re almost there. Once independent researchers and unrelated technological advances have solved 90% of the problems and it looks like there will soon be trillions of dollars to be made by whoever capitalizes on it first, then you can expect the irrational gold rush moment like the one we see with AI now. Until then, it’s all satellites and stock manipulation.