Actually, I can think of some things:
1. Manufacturing heavy equipment will be much cheaper due to low gravity and prevalence of iron. Plus shipping it to Earth will still be relatively affordable because you're only escaping Mar's gravity.
2. It'd be a great testing/research site for wild science experiments like artificial creatures and stuff that would go very badly if not contained on Earth.
Any arguments based on lower cost of anything collapse instantly.
Mars has demonstrated high amusement value. That has sustained all the missions thus far. It's all we have any prospect for in decades to come. God knows we'll need a lot as our ecosystem folds up around us.
> Any arguments based on lower cost of anything collapse instantly.
That's too broad an assumption. In truth, it'll depend on WHAT you are trying to manufacture and if you can keep it on Mars and send its product/output back to Earth. I'm not going to try to predict what stuff we'll want in the future because I don't know. But it's too early to dismiss the possibility of "real utility".
Any claim of utility has a very, very high bar to get over. Mars-high.
Asteroid mining, maybe not so much, depending on how much it can be automated. The problem there quickly becomes how not to saturate demand and drive down prices to the point that the material's not worth transporting. Probably the only solution, ultimately, is to create enough demand in situ to absorb excess capacity.
I can't speak for the science value but these missions do inspire people. I often sit with my two sons and watch launches and missions, or set an alarm to see the ISS fly over. They're fascinated that we're able to send machines to Mars and that people are inside that tiny space station flying overheard.
In space there is just a vacuum, why would we ever go there? Let's see. The Microwave oven. GPS. Cancer treatments.
It's impossible to tell what Mars could offer in full, but we do know one of them upfront: surviving a meteor, Yellowstone, a pandemic, or any one of many ways that the entire species could be wiped out.
Microwave ovens work on the ground, and were invented on the ground. GPS satellites operate under remote control. What about cancer treatments? Weightlessness, vacuum, and high ambient radiation don't cure cancer, singly or in combination.
We could survive a Yellowstone eruption much, much, much more easily in Antarctica than on Mars.
>Microwave ovens work on the ground, and were invented on the ground
Microwave ovens do have nothing to do with space I'll give you that, however the microwave oven was effectively invented by Percy Spencer and Raytheon, while working for Raytheon, working on defense related contracts for radar in 1945 and space exploration from its infancy has been hand in hand with defense/military research.
>GPS satellites operate under remote control
GPS is a direct result of space exploration. Without space exploration, there would be no GPS. Without GPS we'd be producing considerably less food (farming relies heavily on GPS now), there would be far less international shipping (international shipping as it is now, does not work without GPS), without GPS Uber and Lyft would not exist, without GPS the global economy would be drastically different. All because we spent money on space exploration.
We have no idea of what we might discover on Mars. Imagine if we find living extremophiles, their genes could be worth a million times their weight in gold (if they are even DNA based) and the discovery alone would be worth every cent we've ever spent on space exploration as a species.
So, again, microwave ovens have exactly zero to do with space exploration. By the argument, they might better help to justify deploying nuclear weapons.
GPS, likewise, has nothing to do with space exploration. They build them on the ground, and shoot them into orbit, end of story. Further, they don't result in more food production, they just increase profits of tractor owners producing the same amount of food.
Any cancer research conducted aboard the ISS is naked opportunism.
These read like a parody of actual arguments, that taken seriously would lead a reasonable person to conclude instead that all space exploration is pointless. It is fortunate that none would.
>Any cancer research conducted aboard the ISS is naked opportunism.
Um, there are experiments you can do in microgravity that you absolutely can not do on earth.
For one there's no convection due to different relative densities, virtually no no hydrostatic pressure exists, crystals grow larger and more pure which allows for all sorts of things (like far more efficient semiconductors), alloys made in microgravity are more uniform and perform better, etc etc so on and so forth.
We get it, you hate space, that doesn't mean it isn't a gold mine of future innovation.
No one has demonstrated any benefits of space-grown crystals. Semiconductor makers have shown no interest in orbital fabrication. Sintering enables any alloy mixture without weightlessness, and without worry over miscibility that would remain a problem in a weightless melt.
I don't hate space. I just really hate nonsensical, fallacious, and dishonest claims. Promoting falsehoods poisons the well, making legitimate motivations suspect.
The whole purpose of life is to fill space. Through the genetic algorithm it searches the forms that do it.
The algorithm has developed the current forms that can actually plan ahead and try to push through the gaps of 'nothingness' to keep filling the space.
The ROI must be awful. Just think about the cost to get there and the chance of anything of value coming back... a big time net loss no doubt.
I wish I could buy the hype but I’m just not seeing it.