Our mission at NASA is to explore space. This has been an interest and fascination of human kind since the first humans gazed at the stars. We always want to explore new frontiers to better our existence here on Earth. All of the issues you mention are certainly important, but the cooperation between many nations will produce some outstanding advances in technology, medicine, material sciences, engineering, etc that will have direct application for those of us on Earth. I really believe this.
Fruit flies seem to find rotting fruit and go wild with it.
They also have red eyes. If you go to the web page about the experiment, there might be a picture of one. Or you could look it up in a book about insects. Michael, My favorite thing in science was studying living things like plants and animals. My science degree is in plant science.