It's not beneficial to society for you in particular to be on the internet. It would be more beneficial to the starving people if you used that money to buy them food every week.
I think you're getting a little confused here. Yes, now we know why that was an important discovery to make. We know the huge effect it has on the world. But it wasn't the same in the past, when these projects were accepted. They were allowed to go explore, even with the majority of people still believing the world was flat so if they went too far they would fall off and not come back, basically wasting their money. Finding the edges of the plate of the Earth was beneficial to no one, and only became beneficial once they discovered the New World, which no one expected. So to claim that you as a layperson know all the possibilities of space travel and what the benefits are is rather arrogant of you.
You missed the point of that. The research towards colonization will involve building more efficient spaceships, to ferry people and initial supplies back and forth. This will extend the leaps forward to other areas of progress. It's about cause-and-effect, and looking beyond your narrow viewpoint of what the world's potential is. I know it may blow your mind and make you deny it vehemently, but you are not the smartest person in the world when it comes to whether space travel is beneficial or not, and even the smartest people in the world often can't predict the benefits that come from it.
As far as personal money goes; it's their money. I don't know how this is a difficult concept to grasp...it doesn't matter that they have a lot of it, it's theirs to invest wherever they please. If they want to invest it in buying a lot of food, water, and solar panels and shipping them off to Mars, why are you the Mars police telling them that as a random person on the internet, they shouldn't be allowed to use their own money the way they choose?
Edit: In addition, a large portion of their money will go towards hiring engineers to craft the ship and the colony, hiring workers to build it, probably offering some kind of incentive for people going to live there, hiring farmers to work the food and scientists to free the water, a godsend of employment in a stagnating economy.
How is the internet not beneficial? I, as an individual, buy things, sell things, coordinated events, send important documents, among many other import uses. The internet is a MAJOR portion of our global economy, government, communication, educational resources, non-profit organizations, among many other functions. Each individual plays a role in multiple functions listed. Space exploration does none of these things. Therefore, this is an irrelevant analogy.
The Flat Earth/America's Discovery analogy is also irrelevant. Those who traveled to the Americas did not know what they were going to find; it would be equivalent if they had the technology to analyze the materials of the America's and generate images of the terrain. However, we have sent land exploration rovers to Mars, so we know what is expected to be found. The premise that your argument DEPENDS on is that we know very little of what types of resources, and therefore, benefits we will find on Mars. We know exactly what minerals and compounds compose the planet, it consists of very few usable resources that requires more resources in order to excavate them. Not to mention, the Americas were abundant with various resources.
"As far as personal money goes; it's their money. I don't know how this is a difficult concept to grasp...it doesn't matter that they have a lot of it, it's theirs to invest wherever they please. If they want to invest it in buying a lot of food, water, and solar panels and shipping them off to Mars, why are you the Mars police telling them that as a random person on the internet, they shouldn't be allowed to use their own money the way they choose?"
By applying the logic that anyone has the right to buy as much natural resources and use those resources to their liking, there are unintended consequences. By this, I would have a legitimate interest in purchasing millions of tons of trees, petroleum, among other resources and ship them into a box into Saturn,
purely by following the provided logic. The reason why this is not acceptable is that resources are scarce enough on earth, if these resources are being exported out of our planet, regardless if any individual or group can afford them, the planet's resources are being depleted. Of course a large portion of our resources would be required to build another civilization on Mars, with no net benefit to the planet.
Also, this idea that people have this unlimited amount of "personal money" that they are willing and are able to pay thousands of workers with no financial return is an unlikely one. This is possible if the group gets subsidies from the government and receives other types of tax dollars to take care of expenditures via lobbying, as well as their associated companies that have received tax payer dollars via lobbying. Not one tax payer dollar should be spent on this project. Let's say there were 25000 workers on this project, and estimate the cost to pay each worker around an average of 75,000 dollars; that would cost over a billion dollars, that doesn't even cover the costs for billions (if not trillions) of dollars worth of petroleum and gasses, metal materials, lab materials, space shuttle materials, living quarters, land rovers, water extraction plants, space suits, planting materials, electricity, plumbing, heating systems, solar panels, greenhouses, among hundreds of other needed components. No one would is just going to invest this amount of money into this program from their "personal wealth". This money WOULD come out of tax payers money in some form, it is a naive notion to think otherwise. Therefore, this cost could potentially be detrimental to the economy with deficits and decrease the amount of service the government provides or increase the amount of taxes.
"I don't understand why this is such a hard concept to grasp?"
"I know it may blow your mind and make you deny it vehemently, but you are not the smartest person in the world."
"So to claim that you as a layperson know all the possibilities of space travel and what the benefits are is rather arrogant of you."
Sidenote*
Please don't try to condescend to me, those who are not confident in their knowledge of issues tend to side-step points by resorting to irrelevant analogies or irreverent insults which are not pertinent to the many variables at hand; the Ad Hominem approach does the exact opposite to solidify arguments, and is a catalyst for hostile discussions. Please reserve blatantly rude comments for another site - thanks. Next time I will simply not reply.
