I honestly have to side with my dad on this: What can space offer us at the moment? It's not like we can just go to the moon and bring it's resources back.
I think people are still caught up in the fact that we did it before, why aren't we doing it again. the answer is simple: When we did do it, it was for a stupid reason, just to prove a point. Nothing more.
To be perfectly honest, you sound like the kind of near-sighted person that would say that computers would never become an important part of society or that there was no use to the internet.
At the moment, there are almost no benefits to ANY new technology. I recall an article about an artificial hand that could be manipulated using only the mind. But it's in the early stages of development, and is prohibitively expensive. I'd be willing to bet a million billion dollars that most of the people funding that program have two hands and will probably never lose even one hand, so why on Earth would they want to fund that? Because there are great foreseeable benefits that cannot be gotten without overcoming the initial funding and development process. This is analogous to the space program, except the space program is incredibly much more expensive than anything else, and the biggest benefits will come to humanity centuries, if not millennia, of hard work and funding. Namely, those benefits would involve not exhausting all resources on Earth and not overpopulating Earth. But you CANNOT expect to EVER achieve those goals if you simply ignore the space program.
The greatest achievements of a healthy space program, regrettably, will not be seen in our lifetime. But they won't be seen in
anyone's lifetime if we don't foot the bill.
