> why so many people think about going to space and spend so much money on it when there are people in the US who drink water that catches on fire Because peop

> why so many people think about going to space and spend so much money on it when there are people in the US who drink water that catches on fire Because people drinking bad water are poor so it's not profitable to help them. This problem can be solved with current technology (and in fact was solved in many countries with slightly stricter environmental legislation). > Seems like we should work on the truly hard problems rather than the ones that are basically “just go up, really fast” The problem with that is assuming that focusing on solving problem X is the way to solve problem X. In history it often turned out that problem X was only solved by people who ignored X and worked on Y instead. For example the hard problem of 70% of kids dying before adulthood wasn't mostly solved thanks to people who worked on it (shamans, healers and priests) but by people who worked on "useless" abstract stuff like math, philosophy and writing systems. If we put everybody on it we would still devise new ways of praying or dancing to stop gods killing infants. In general it's better not to put EVERYBODY on the same problem. Humankind is pretty good at solving many problems in parallel. Some people are better at X, others at Y. Also there might be interactions that we don't know upfront. Maybe designing space colonies gives us a cheap way to filter water on Earth as a byproduct? Would be pretty stupid to wait forever because we guessed the order wrong. Cancer is more serious than broken bones or flu, but it doesn't mean that we should assign all doctors to only deal with cancer until it's solved.