I am a space cadet. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s during the early days of space travel. I remember Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, the first landing on the moon, and I have followed the travels of the Voyagers into the void. It has fascinated me for decades. Today I watched live as NASA landed their Perseverance rover on Mars, and saw the first pictures come through a few minutes later. As usual, I felt a strong emotionalism as I considered the brilliance of the human mind.
I am also well aware of the billions upon billions of dollars that have gone into the space program, billions that could have been spent to deal with the serious problems we have here on earth. Those billions of dollars have been expended on training and technology and software and building teams well beyond anything we could have imagined in the days of the Mercury or Gemini projects.
We cannot get that money back but I do believe that if we concentrated our efforts and built sophisticated teams in the same way that NASA has, we could solve many of the earth’s worst problems. I am not a technological determinist; in fact, I would choose to use as little technology as possible (though much would be inevitable). What I am thinking of here is developing teams rather than machines, problem solving brains trained and resourced to cope with the devastating effects of “civilization” on both planets and people.
If we can solve the trillions of problems that beset us on the way to Mars, it must be possible to solve the problems we have here on earth. It just takes the will to do it.
Jak's View of Vancouver v.3 
The billions and billions spent on space travel are always the dollars that are first questioned as being more suitable for cancer research etc. Yet few question the equally considerable sums poured into systems of greed and destruction such as those involved in financial trading systems (which add no perceptible value to the human community), Bitcoin mining and wanton property development at the expense of perfectly good existing stock.
Missions to Mars are the baby steps we need to take if we are to become a mature spacefaring planet. Without them, we are doomed to die caged on a prison of our own making.
[…] First We Take Mars Then The Earth […]