You’re assuming the resources can be distributed better, if only they weren’t “wasted” on space travel. I suspect the problems you’re describing exist _because_

You’re assuming the resources can be distributed better, if only they weren’t “wasted” on space travel. I suspect the problems you’re describing exist _because_ we can’t distribute better - we don’t know how. We’ve reached the limits of social organization at this stage of civilization and those problems won’t ever be solved unless we innovate our way out of it. You might counter my argument with a plethora of “obvious” solutions, but I suspect most of them will be top-down ones, that, unfortunately, that don’t seem to ever work. You might also enumerate instances where top-down initiatives have worked successfully, but I’d argue that in each of the cases there was something about the environment that made it stick - the soil was already fertile. The amount of money spent on “lofty” pursuits like space exploration is almost orthogonal to the issue at hand, within reason, obviously - it’s definitely possible to bankrupt yourself like the Soviet Union did. I put “lofty” in quotes because these pursuits are obviously very practical in the long run. I don’t want to repeat the argument you’ve probably heard a million times, but it’s obviously true that if everyone thought like this back when we living in caves - we’d never even get huts. And we were much poorer back then.