Why is the American gov wasting money on moon and mars?

Originally posted by Xeven
We definitely need to colonize outside of Earth to ensure survival of man kind.
Earth could become poisonous to life tomorrow for all we know. Asteroids, super volcanoes, poll flips, sun could burp. Even more likely we kill ourselves.

Oh, nonsense. Mankind is not going to survive, no matter what we do. We are lousy spacefarers, with our immune systems shutting down at a moment's notice and our massive bone loss. Our intelligent machines will supplant us in less than 1,000 years. If anybody is going to fly away to an other planet, it will be them. In less than 5,000 years we will have such good control of our own genetics that we will evolve ourselves out of the human species altogether. So we're goners.

And look at it this way, let's say we're lucky enough not to have an asteroid blast us back to hominids in the next few thousand years, and by some crazy, lucky method we were able to load up a bunch of people into a space ship and blast them to a different planet. It would still be incredibly expensive. At this point, we can't even ensure that everybody here gets malaria medication or even a decent meal. How are we going to afford sending a bunch of people another planet? Even if the atmosphere of this new planet (which we haven't even found yet) was a little bit different than ours, it would still require everybody to take or make most of what they needed to survive there. Even more expensive.

Then say maybe you manage to fly through radiation saturated space and life and establish a population of a million people (that's a lot!) on another planet. Well, the population doesn't stop growing on either planet. Earth population continues to grow during all this time, making it a hell hole. The growing new population on the new planet is going to want to try to avoid overtaxing their new planet, so it wouldn't be long until they start turning away any new refugees from Earth. In any event, it doesn't reduce the population load on this planet in any way, no matter how many new planets we found that might be okay to live on (and we haven't found a good one yet). So then it just becomes a matter of who gets slammed by a stray asteroid first. I hear the robots laughing at our plight.

Doom. That's what humanity has to look forward to. Colonization is wacky crazy, and a holdover notion from when we used to sail our little boats to "new" lands. Traveling to another planet just isn't comparable.