How many billions of transistors in an iPhone processor?

The case is fine; the problem is your ignorance to seemingly many factors.

> As far as "human curiosity beyond rationality" I would have been much more sympathetic to that argument before it became inescapably obvious that in its pursuit we have quite literally set the world on fire.

Well, one of humanity's first great advancements was, in fact, to create fire.

We are making tremendous efforts in many different fields, but it's becoming abundantly clear that the only thing you actually care about is global warming, which, unsurprisingly, is something that we have people working on and hundreds of billions of dollars being spent annually on to solve. Oh, and wouldn't you know it, the space program's existence continues to contribute to climate science with earth-observing satellites [1] that provide all sorts of data that would only be possible from space. Thanks, space program!

[1] https://eospso.nasa.gov/

> Humans aren't going anywhere any time soon, and I see nothing meaningful to choose between Mars today and Mars a hundred years from now, or two hundred, or a thousand. In that meantime, our efforts could make a meaningful difference as to how many billion humans are alive to celebrate that happy day.

Once again, you've not provided any rationale or reason as to why we can't work on more than one thing at once, or why the space program in particular has earned your ire. You can look up the dozens of advancements we've made directly thanks to our endeavors in heading to space. In fact i've already given you one very important example as to how it's relevant to your interests. You choosing to remain ignorant about the rest is your own choice, but it's quite clear that you're too ignorant to be making any value judgments on the space program at large.

Why not just admit that your argument is purely ideological? Or at least make an argument for what that money (that you don't seem to know even how much is being spent) should be spent on and how much further it could go in that area? The space program is not in ideological opposition with solving climate change; in fact it's playing a critical role in it.

> You really want to convince me that space boosterism might still, in spite of everything, have merit? Show me you can take the long view.

This is the long view; immense progress can happen from random discovery or it can happen slowly and gradually over time. We pursue these avenues because we don't know where it will take us or how long, just that we pursue these curiosities because it is what humanity was made for. If we only had 100 people on earth then sure, maybe it wouldn't be worth looking to the stars. But we don't have only 100 people.

Of course it is! And so is yours.

If not from ideology, where come you by the idea that "we pursue these curiosities because it is what humanity was made for?" That statement has zero factual content and can be meaningfully parsed only as a statement of belief. How do you mean me to imagine it as not ideological in origin?

I would, though, prefer it if we could stay on the same page with regard to what we're discussing. At no point for example have I said I have a problem with placing satellites in Earth orbit, and not by accident have I been specific in phrases like "putting humans in space". Robots in space, serving our ends, are cheap, easy, durable, and worth the trouble. Meat in space, at vastly greater expense and fragile complexity, is not.

Certainly we can do more than one thing at once, too. But every thing we do has an opportunity cost. My point is simply that the opportunity cost of putting humans in space has yet to be justified by any result - very notably including any output of the Space Shuttle program, where my opinion largely tracks Cegłowski's wellknown 2005 review [1], albeit perhaps with a touch more charity - and with no realistic prospect of that changing, I see no compelling reason to throw any more good money after such a vast sea of bad.

[1] https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm