And yet, disregarding the brief forays into world of balloons, we went from flapping our arms to not flapping our arms to powered flight to landing men on the Moon in the span of less than 100 years. This is how fast progress moves when people care. There is a staggering list of unsolved problems to make a self-sustaining human presence off-world, yes, but instead of solving it, we're bitching about one person driving few billion $ to be spent on it.

This isn’t too central to my point, and was more meant as a bit of colorful verbiage, but one thing to note is that some kinds of progress are non-linear. I think the hope and sometimes expectation can be that it’s on a rising asymptote, but the reverse is more common. New understandings spread and the limits of the materials and energy sources/storage of the day are reached. From there progress becomes a matter of refining concepts, iterative improvements, and targeted research (such as lightweight composite materials). Like a kid in their first library, the world of literature can seem endless. After some time though, the reader learns that they’re benefiting from a huge backlog, and the rate of new works is relatively stable over time.

Initially planes were improved and records shattered year over year. The time between a brief hop in a wooden biplane and a transcontinental voyage was shockingly brief. The rate of returns diminished over time; consider the rocket tech of the moonshot vs. today; it’s hardly the leap from propellers to jets. Our goals have increased along with our imaginations, but not our tech. We’re still burning fuel to create thrust, still moving at roughly the same velocities.

That’s not bitching, it’s just reality. The bitching comes in when people try to frame this in terms of my lack of faith disturbing them. The Wrights didn’t need our faith, they had sound engineering and scienctific principles. Recognizing what needs to be done to achieve a goal isn’t dismissal, it’s a call to action. Pretending that we’re on the cusp of something we’re not on the other hand, can lead to complacency and failure.

But the market has only so much incentive to pursue those (after all, things we already have work well enough, and nowadays, spending money on marketing has better ROI than spending it on R&D). It's implicitly understood that for all space-related tech breakthroughs, their biggest impact will be planetside

Increasingly the immune system and all matters which relate to it have become the focus of medicine, especially cancer research. There is a diminishing set of returns on the pharmaceutical end of the spectrum, while biologics and immune therapies are taking off. Everyone who wants to live, and not get sick, is going to see the ROI here. That’s just for the human end of it, needless to say the benefits of robotics, fusion, and AI are also apparent and being pursued.

And that's a very good reason to doubling down on space - the conditions are ripe for rapid technological development there.

Absolutely, but not on Mars, and probably not with people. We have more pressing issues out there frankly, from acquiring resources, vacuum industries, and exploration, todisaster mitigation. A persistent human presence on Mars is impossible for now, so the pursuit is symbolic. Fuck symbolism. Humans are fragile and we value ourselves, while robotic exploration and labor is far more realistic in space.

Finally to your related point, while that’s certainly an issue online and in parts of the developed world, it is not how most people live. I agree that we need to aim up and out, but realistically, not religiously. We should invest heavily in the kinds of dual-use tech which can support our activities offworld, and down here. Energy production, storage and transmission, medicine, and robotics are worth the fight, and will help in both worlds.