Everybody’s got their own priorities. In terms of improving the state of humanity, I don’t see the direct connection. I guess it’s fun, because you shoot rockets up in the air. But it’s not an area that I’ll be putting money into
That' the beauty of it, a lot of rich people with their own ideas and priorities. The world problems existed even before the rich started spending on space exploration, and likely we'll have problems for millions of years.
This quote from Interstellar is thought provoking: "we're not meant to save to earth, we're meant to leave it"
I'd like to add to your quote here. It's not something from the film, but it's something I feel like not enough people understand: The Earth doesn't need saving. No matter what we do, we cannot kill the Earth. We do not have that power. We can make the Earth inhospitable for ourselves, but it will recover. The Earth will keep spinning until the Sun expands and swallows Earth whole billions of years from now.
We, as a species, do not have any sort of power capable of stopping the Earth from doing its thing. In fact, one could argue that we are part of the Earth's thing. We don't exist on Earth, we are part of Earth.
That' the beauty of it, a lot of rich people with their own ideas and priorities. The world problems existed even before the rich started spending on space exploration, and likely we'll have problems for millions of years.
This quote from Interstellar is thought provoking: "we're not meant to save to earth, we're meant to leave it"