We have a desperate immediate issue, the destruction of our biosphere. Simply mitigating this will cost an incredibly huge amount of resources starting now and ongoing for a really long time, but we aren't even spending a tiny fraction of the amount of resources to not destroying ourselves.

Your response is to spend a huge amount of money on a project which is literally as far away from the Earth's biosphere as possible, on the off chance that this come up with some "knowledge" that will magically fix our problems at home.

Lack of knowledge is not our issue. We have so much raw knowledge already that it paralyzes humanity.

We know the problem - humanity is destroying the planet with carbon dioxide as well as ten thousand other forms of waste.

We know the solution - we have to cut down our consumption by an order of magnitude somehow while not killing our poorest inhabitants.

The reason we won't cut down our consumption and will charge right through that is not because of some information we might find on Mars or the world Ceres. (IA, RIP)

The reason we're going to consume ourselves out of a civilization is because we choose to continue consuming obsessively, as a group, and mostly, one at a time too.

The best Mars could give us is some additional hints on how to technologically effect change - if we wanted to.

But we don't want to change. Mars won't make us want to. It is will to change that is lacking.

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We have very limited resources. Space travel is hugely expensive. Beyond LEO explorations, it has brought us nothing except answers to our curiosity. Yes, I care about those, but I care about the future survival of human civilization a lot more.

I have been a big fan of space exploration for over fifty years. I would have made the same case as you in 1970, and in fact, I did just that sometime around then.

I was wrong. Nothing got done to fix the problems, and now it's a dire emergency, by far the greatest in history. We need to divert our resources directly toward that emergency. We've made excuses because we're in love with toys and technology and its products and now the shit is hitting the fan.

I would also add that space travel is incredibly polluting and damaging to the environment. LOX itself is a near-perfect fuel but the production of rockets is an environmental nightmare.