In contrast, I prefer to work on a problem that can be solved by technical achievements in math, science, and engineering within my lifetime. Don't get me wron

In contrast, I prefer to work on a problem that can be solved by technical achievements in math, science, and engineering within my lifetime. Don't get me wrong. I think utopian fantasy is cool and fun, but that's what Star Trek television series are for, and the history channel/books, if you want non-fiction. Sociological problems are at least an order of magnitude more difficult than space problems. When you send a robot to Mars, you don't have to worry about how much power it will embezzle from the communications array, or whether it will refuse to take its meds, or whether the value of the work it is doing is enough to pay its mortgage. You could quite easily spend 100 times the cost of a Mars colony on the people problems here on Earth, and achieve absolutely zero visible results from it. Besides that, unless you're going to force students into social work education rather than aerospace engineering, there would be a lot of skilled laborers leaving university with no useful jobs to do. You would be spending your money on them sitting at home, uselessly dreaming about space, rather than spending just a bit more for them to be actually working to advance technology.