At the end of the video, Margaret says that space exploration was controversial in the 1970s and 1980s. People wondered why the government was spending time and money exploring the solar system when critical problems existed here on Earth. What do you think? Should the government resolve Earthly issues before exploring space? Or is a scientific investigation of distant worlds a fundamentally human endeavor of exploration? Explain your argument.

No. Governments should not attempt to solve all problems on the globe, before exploring. One. Human life is one continous series of problems and challenges. We will never get past the goal-post, because it will continously move. It is an impossible goal.

Should we not try anyway? Why pour money into a spaceprogram, when we could instead help homeless people, to take just one of the, relatively, smaller problems we are facing? It is hard to argue for exploration, especially in an endeavour as expensive as spaceexploratoin, in the face of a homeless man.

But humanity is fundamentally an exploring race. The reason we are everywhere on this planet, for good and bad, is that we have explored. The reason that life-expectancy is at a record high, even in poor countries in the third world, is that we are explorers. The introductory video mentions that. We are explorers, not only in a geographical, or astronomical sense, but in every sense of the word. Abandoning the exploration, even the expensive space-version of it, betrays our future. To take just one very basic example, the images brought home from the moon, for the first time showing how small, beautiful and fragile our planet is, made it clear to humanity how extraordinary lucky we are to live. And how important it is to take care of the one planet in the universe where we know live exist.

Now we just need to prove that intelligent live exists somewhere in the universe. Demonstrating that it exists on Earth, would be a good place to start.