OMG, that's a long reply... I'll try to answer, but I doubt I can cover all of it.

> [...]what is the unit of measure? [...] My intuition is that you may be conflating [1] physical death (concrete) with causes of death (abstract).

The context of my reply was this:

1>> Here's an idea: how about we start with a (at least seemingly) much smaller task: can we even try to genuinely be concerned about the (physically) preventable deaths of millions of people each year?

2>> So who’s to decide what we should sacrifice to keep others alive?

3>> The above poster specifically wrote "physically preventable"

There's no quantitative argument in there and it's not needed for the argument to work.

Example: A person has a car accident X miles away from the hospital. The traffic is bad. The ambulance is late. The person dies before reaching the hospital. IF there was an emergency hospital closer, or a highway nearby that leads to the hospital and improves the traffic in the area, that person could still be alive. That death could be prevented. Let's imagine that a hospital or highway is built. The ambulance arrives in time and saves his/her life. But then, accidents happen everywhere. With that hospital or highway built, a person that has the exact same accident, only this time is X miles away from the NEW hospital - that was previously unpreventable, no ambulance had a chance to get there in time - becomes preventable now with another hospital and/or highway. Because: we did it before, why not do it again?

> if preventable death was about to pay a visit to your doorstep, would you like for someone to step in and stop it?

Yes, obviously. No person that is emotionally involved would answer differently. Fortunately, the persons that make decisions in this matter are (usually) not emotionally involved. If they are, they (usually) take the morally corrupt way of improving services for their location, or situation, with resources that could better cover a larger area/population.

> During the COVID pandemic / mass psychological phenomenon [1] a few years back, were you pro-vaxx or anti-vaxx?

Niether. My opinion is that vccines should be free, people should be allowed to vaxx or not, but if they choose not to vaxx, and they get sick with the disease, they should pay the <cost of treatment> * <vaxx efficiency %>. AFAIK, this was never applied.

> I might ask you a similar question about children dying globally from malnutrition.

I'm not getting the point you are trying to make. All NASA's money would only save a few of them, while increasing truck accidents, polution, forests cuts for agriculture, and probably terrorism too. Child malnutrition is not preventable today in my opinion, not unless developed countries stop exploiting their countries - but that doesn't require NASA's resources.

> Should we care about such things, and if so: why should we care about them?

Some people care about the future and some don't. Some care about the future, but only the immediate future. Some care about the future for their remaining estimated life time (après moi, le déluge). Some care about the far future of humanity. I consider myself in the last category.

Concerning the far future of humanity, the more variation in everything, the better. Uniformity, global-<anything>, and Earth-only is very bad, because it all falls apart at the same time in the same way. We should colonise space, have other economic systems than capitalism around the world, have some kings, have some dictators, have rich, have poor, have safe cities, have death zones, have peace in some coutries, have war in others, have free mandatory vaxx in some places, have no vaxx at all in others. See what works and what doesn't. What good does it do if nobody vaccinates and we all die in the next pandemic and what good does it do if we all vaxx and the vaccine is bad and kills us all? What good is global peace if we don't invest in rocket engines, guidance systems, GPS and crypto, and what good is a global war that destroys the entire planet? I would like that future people have a choice, if what they want is to move to Mars.

[1] No, I'm not an AI.