Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits? Couldn’t we do those things directly, without going there?
It seems to me that, today, those who have the money to spend on these endeavors would only do so if there were perceived short-term benefits to themselves. That means they plan to exploit the resources, or increase their own power somehow.
I know the good engineers that make this happen are doing it for the challenge and in the pursuit of knowledge, and I know that’s why we poors support it, but that doesn’t “pay the bills.” What is the motivation behind the money? Why are they really doing this?
Interestingly, the Solar System as a whole also works this way. You sometimes hear futurists proposing that in the long term, humanity might use self-replicating robots to dismantle Mercury, and use the material to construct a Dyson swarm, allowing humanity to access untold levels of energy and matter.
The big downside to this is that you can’t just start taking apart pieces of the Solar System. While the planets aren’t in a true resonance pattern with each other, they do have a certain clockwork stability to them. The planets we have now were not the first generation of worlds in this star system. Multiple rounds of planet formation happened, sometimes with multiple terrestrial worlds forming in the same or similar orbits. The early inner Solar System had dozens of Mars-sized rocks in it. They kept forming, colliding, breaking, merging, and shattering until the system found a state that would be stable for billions of years. Simulations on the future of the Sol system show it to be dynamically stable for billions of years into the future. But if you remove any piece of the Solar System from that clockwork intricacy, that stability disappears. Then you have to worry about the planets slowly perturbing each other’s orbits, small nudges building up over millions of years until world’s are colliding or being ejected from Solar orbit entirely.