These justifications aren't novel, and aren't really much better than you claim mine to be. You gesture vaguely at technological progress, as every humans-in-space booster does. I have yet to hear anyone defend any of those advances as both useful enough to be worth wanting, and impossible to achieve on Earth. That's an easier job in this case because we're discussing a counterfactual, so you're as free to invent something novel to defend as I am to imagine a trillion dollars going to an aid organization that actually manages to put the money where it does the most good, rather than serving as a combined graft slush fund and political football as most such organizations do now.

> At what point in your hypothetical world where you got to make these policies would it be acceptable for humanity to start exploring space again?

When there is no human on Earth who suffers in a way that money can prevent, I'll no longer consider a dollar spent on putting a human into space a dollar culpably wasted.

> Humanity's driven by curious people willing to explore well beyond what seems rational to most people, not myopic luddites who would eschew entire avenues of exploration simply because they can't understand the utility in it.

I grew up suffused in the US space program. Huntsville was my favorite vacation. I read everything I could get my hands on - which, thanks to my grandfather, was a lot - I dreamed of astronaut school, at least until I learned it had visual acuity requirements. But even that little dampened the dream; I still spent most of my childhood studying with the intent of becoming an engineer and ultimately joining NASA. There are a lot of reasons that didn't happen, but none of them had to do with the dream itself failing - and in some ways, it still hasn't; do you think, if I still could believe there was anything for us either to find or to offer out there, I wouldn't want my people to go to the stars?

If, even in the face of all that, I still can be unconvinced by the case for putting humans as we are now into space, then that case needs to be better made. But dreamer though I was, the thing I came eventually to understand about a dream is that, however beautiful it may be, eventually you wake up and find reality still there.

As far as "human curiosity beyond rationality" goes, I would have been much more sympathetic to that argument before it became inescapably obvious that in its pursuit we have quite literally set the world on fire.

In the face of an error on that scale, I believe only a fool would fail to adjust his perspective, at least to encompass the possibility that, in the argot of my youth, we have gotten quite a bit too big for our breeches.

That we should reach beyond our grasp is something even I consider creditable in the species. That we should reach into the gearbox of the world and have it tear off a couple fingers, and then want to go right on reaching without a thought at least to stanch the bleeding, at some point becomes self-destructive madness. An individual human displaying such behavior would be restrained for his own good. As a species, we would have to do that for ourselves, or reality will do it for us. It is doing exactly that now. We would be wise to take that into account in deciding our next actions. We won't. But we could, and we should.

Humans aren't going anywhere any time soon, and I see nothing meaningful to choose between Mars today and Mars a hundred years from now, or two hundred, or a thousand. In that meantime, our efforts could make a meaningful difference as to how many billion humans are alive to celebrate that happy day.

You really want to convince me that space boosterism might still, in spite of everything, have merit? Show me you can take the long view.