@Kardamom, maybe. Or maybe not. At some point in human history, we will need to visit and colonize other planets. Earth will probably one day become overpopulated, or too polluted, or even succumb to a natural disaster. At some point we will need to spend the time and resources developing extraplanetary technology. If not now, when?
I felt the same way as you about the large hadron collider. The greatest and most expensive scientific experiment in history, all built to find what for most people is the answer to an incomprehensible physics equation? I thought that money could have better been spent feeding the poor. And maybe that’s true. But then the flipside to this is, at what point do you allow the money to be spent on scientific research instead of solving intractable social problems? Can we only spend money on physics and astronomy when there are no more poor people?
And then there’s the unpredictable nature of the fruits of scientific research. The higgs boson has absolutely no value today. But in 50 years, who knows? That finding may lay the groundwork for something that is of huge social value—just like research into quantum mechanics laid the groundwork for computing decades later. Sending a robot to Mars to melt rocks has no social value now, but what about in 50 years? NASA solved a series of very difficult problems in landing that rover on another planet, and the solutions to those problems may one day have immense value to human society. You just can’t predict this stuff, which is why I support a “wide net” of scientific research.