How does this benefit the public in the foreseeable future? Why should the public fund it? Why not stick to private funding? Look at SpaceX, there are plenty of

How does this benefit the public in the foreseeable future? Why should the public fund it? Why not stick to private funding? Look at SpaceX, there are plenty of rich people and them aside, people interested in this subject should contribute. I know this is an unpopular view here but I just don't get why the public has to fund this using tax dollars. We all have views on what tax money should be spent on but can we not agree that the public should benefit from it with some guarantee of success.even if they succeed there is no guarantee it will benefit anyone. scifi aside, known physics does not permit anything to travel to our solar system faster than a few million years. Maybe aliens left some useful information in a format humans can somehow decode, is this very very small chance of succeess worth considering the pursuit beneficial to the public? There are many very urgent things that need funding. Even wild ideals like universal basic income or a CO2 cleaning factory can be useful to the public in the foreseeable future. I get that this will not neccesarily take away from other projects,but heck, I would rather see it go to pay off 0.0001% of national debt than this. People can donate,billionaires exist.