Some grandiose ideas are fun but they get you nowhere and leave you worse off as they represent a gigantic mis-allocation of capital.
The ability to set up colonies in space has very little to do with star trek fandom (I can't stand it so no 'star trek' fan here). It is a way to expand our envelope, to reduce our viewpoint of Earth as a special place in the universe (it's only special to us right now) and it will, in the longer term yield dividends in ways that we probably can not even think of today, just like Columbus probably had no idea of the magnitude of the future consequences of his voyage.
If every bit of research or every human activity to date would be viewed with the eye towards immediate economic sense then we'd still be hunter gatherers living in Africa, all of us.
Discovery, curiosity and a drive to expand our envelopes both in a physical sense and in a mental sense are valuable too, even if they don't show up next week on some balance sheet of humanity, Inc.
Not to mention the fact that if there'd been an interest in following modern procedures (that obviously didn't exist at the time), perhaps genocide by disease might have been avoided.
What's the official stance of historians on this? I thought that it was an intentional biological strike.
(Even if one must be cynical, let us be fully cynical, not conveniently partially cynical: Historically speaking there was little compunction about simply killing people. Distributing infected blankets is an awfully roundabout and even dangerous-to-the-distributors way of doing something there was a much simpler way to do. I'd say "imagine the way we think of bird flu today" but back then the putative blanket infectors would be even more terrified of smallpox than that.)
I don't see a way accidental-genocide-by-disease could have been avoided. It only takes one sneeze to set off a powderkeg tens of thousands of years in the making. It was unfortunately structurally inevitable. (Inconceivably, beyond words "unfortunate", but still, inevitable.) It's hard to call it deliberate when I would frankly question our ability today to prevent it; very similarly, witness the number of invasive species that have been put into ecosystems even when we have known better and tried to avoid it. It just takes one action at the right place and the right time, and boom, exponential biological explosion.
Like what? Trade routes on earth have predictable results - if they found a place to trade or a route to somewhere already existing, that's only to be expected.
There's nothing to trade with in space; there's no way we're having a colony on Mars making plastic trinkets and rocketing them back to Earth for sale, or buying Coca Cola rocketed from Earth.
I grant that you can't think of "dividends which we can't think of today", but what categories are you even speculating about? What even might there be?
The Potential of successful colonization of another planet is a total unknown, just like the potential of colonizing another continent is a total unknown. At least we know the other planet exist, whereas America was a bit of a surprise for Columbus.
Letting economic calculations guide you in the day-to-day running of a business is fine. But we as humanity can afford a little bit of money set aside for things that have no immediate value. Art and culture are amongst our most valuable possessions, but their value seems to be appreciating with time relative to the time when they were created. Much of our scientific knowledge had no immediate value at the time of discovery.
Columbus voyage may have made 'perfect sense' from an economic perspective in hindsight because it worked, but there was no guarantee that it would and plenty of people were arguing this was a waste of resources at the time.
I'm just as proud or more so of what humanity has achieved when economic gain wasn't the immediate focus as I am of the things we've achieved when economic gain was at the forefront of our thoughts guiding us to make our decisions. There is room for both of those.
Well, my experience of large scale EU funding programmes was that all the efforts to predict the economic yield of research projects was, at best, complete nonsense.
After all, who thought that by funding a nuclear research organisation (CERN) we'd get something like the Web? Has anyone got an economic model that could have predicted that?
NASA's budget for 2014 was $17.647 billion, which is approx 0.5% of US federal government spending [1].
Total ESA budget for 2015 was €4.28 billion (US$5.51 billion) [2].
Everyone else (including Russia) spends not very much at all.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
[1] http://usich.gov/resources/uploads/asset_library/FY2015_Budg...
Homelessness is certainly an important problem, but is it more important than (for example) tackling antibiotic resistance ($450 million budget in FY2014 [1])? For any deserving issue/problem it is possible to play this game all day, as illustrated by the Fallacy of relative privation [2].
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/os...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation
No machine can come back and tell you how it felt to be there. How the Apollo 8 crew reacted the first time they looked back and saw the distant Earth as a planet, no different than the Moon ahead of them. Or how was it to be completely cut off from all of mankind while behind the Moon. Or to take that now famous earthrise picture.
There are two things here. The first, is the quest for knowledge. About how things are and how things became. Robots can do that wonderfully well.
The other is the quest for our place in the vastness of space. One is the quest for knowledge, for information. The second is the quest for meaning. No machine will give us that.
What useful stuff can we mine from the moon or from asteroids?
The moon is thought contain Helium 3 which can be used for fusion reactors.[2]
[1]http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110907132044.ht...
[2]http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Preparing_for_the_Future/S...
Lots of stuff.
Although asteroids and Earth accreted from the same starting materials, Earth's relatively stronger gravity pulled all heavy siderophilic (iron-loving) elements into its core during its molten youth more than four billion years ago.[9][10][11] This left the crust depleted of such valuable elements until a rain of asteroid impacts re-infused the depleted crust with metals like gold, cobalt, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium, ruthenium and tungsten (some flow from core to surface does occur, e.g. at the Bushveld Igneous Complex, a famously rich source of platinum-group metals). Today, these metals are mined from Earth's crust, and they are essential for economic and technological progress. Hence, the geologic history of Earth may very well set the stage for a future of asteroid mining.
But I think the exciting part is that you have raw materials outside of Earth's gravity well. It's really expensive to haul stuff up, so a source of water in high orbit is really valuable if you want to do space stuff.
I mean, we currently fashion a decent chunk of gold into useless trinkets.
[0] - http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2015/07/19/trillion-dol...