Nasa can't send humans to Mars until it gets the food right

[Rynn]

I don't see any reason we can't do both space development and ecosystem repair/management. But I'm against taking a 'we have to solve all of Earth's problems before we do space' approach because a fair number of problems might be solved using resources from space and I also feel that approach is just a cop out along the lines of 'when will we do X - someday' that parents so often do - with the only intent to shut the kids up and with full intent that 'someday' will never come.

Short on time today but just to clarify; my position isn't that we shouldn't invest in space research and development, it's more than I don't believe it's any sort of priority. Not picking on Ian at all but his comment along the lines of humanity wasting how ever many decades not funneling significantly more money into space is the position that I object to (and that a lot of people seem to have). Basically if we lived in a world where people could fill out a form and choose where and how much of their tax went (which would be an awful idea) space science would be very far down on my list of things to pay for, over anything to do with ecological science.

The reason why I bring ecoscience up in a discussion about space rather than listing all the other things I think are a greater priority is that progressing the former significantly is a great pre-requisite for the latter. Learning how to better model and maintain ecosystems, developing extremely efficient recycling infrastructure, production gains from swarms that observe and keep the biosphere healthy etc...well space habitats fall right out of that.