Going straight at the problem is valuable, but the beutifull thing about our society is that all of us don't have to do the same thing - finding solutions isn't

Going straight at the problem is valuable, but the beutifull thing about our society is that all of us don't have to do the same thing - finding solutions isn't always invest X into Y to solve it. I'm sure framing the problem in terms of colonising Mars is going to change so many fundamental assumptions. When you give people the task to solve X they go with what's already there and try to improve, and then they get stuck in a local minimum - software engineers should be able to appriciate this considering most of our industry is built on legacy design decisions from 70s and 80s. Project like Mars let's you go back to square one on a lot of implicit assumptions and see what comes out of it. Not to mention that it's going to be inspiring for a lot of smart people, both because of the difficulty and the scifi aspect. If they invested serious money into it I would be shocked if it didn't result in widespread real world innovations.