Yes, but you know, instead of building a moon base to get to the planets so that you can build colonies or extract resources, you could spend that same money on Earth, be it on resource extraction (for the profit motive) or something else that the species finds valuable (for the betterment of humanity angle... e.g. there are sub-saharan african villages without clean water or sanitation, etc).

The economists call it "Opportunity Cost" and all that. The opportunity cost of space exploration is kinda high, and humanity's resources are limited. I like space probes and space bases at least as much as the next citizen of the world, but they're not my priority.

This is a relatively short-sighted view, and the problems with it can be summarized with two very glib statements:

1.) Don't shit where you sleep. 2.) Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

As a species we really ought to stop doing both of those...

It's really easy to call it a short-sighted view when you're not paying the time value of money on the expense.

No, you're just missing the point. People are focused on the profit and monetary cost of decisions based on their limited capacity to reason about time, which is on the order of probably 10-30 years (if we're being overly generous).

Reiterating, not putting all our eggs in one basket ie self-sustaining human populations not on Earth in the shortish term, not in our solar system in the less shortish term, and not in our galaxy in the longish term, is not something a single person is going to do in their lifetime. It may take (tens/hundreds of) thousands of years to accomplish these goals, if they are even possible, but we should start them now because the alternative is a random case of bad luck with a meteor, or a nutter with a thermonuclear or biological weapon, or whatever. Extinction events.

People struggle to see beyond their own needs and desires. If we're to survive as a species, we have to think and plan on time scales that dwarf the current recorded human history.

This isn't meant to be an indictment of you personally, I'm just pointing out that the view-point, though normal and held by the majority of people, is still short-sighted by definition: a human lifetime is nothing in comparison to human history, and the potential human future.

Humanity's resources being limited is pretty much a direct function of stopping further exploration--it would make more sense to try and devote resources now, while we still have them, to securing more resources for the future.