Last Days
I guess I should warn you that I'm a Ph.D. in history.
Western governments are always much better at putting on band-aids than
in developing long-term solutions. Space isn't a waste, it's an investment
and a way towards a solution, and all that money is spent here on the
ground creating jobs in a positive program that matches the essentially
negative sum game of military spending. We'll keep feeding the rest of the
world for a while but sooner or later our resources are going to hit the
wall. We can either start in at solving the problem in a positive manner
now or wait until massive deaths by starvation and resulting wars force us
to do it, in which case we'll have to endure a decade of horrors before the
thing's ready to go.
While I expected to see a manned Mars landing in my lifetime (I don't
now) it's not the immediate task at hand. That task is to create permanent
floating colonies of large size and self-sustaining nature which can be
used to convert pure solar into beamable microwave energy, produce
high-tech advances possible in zero-G labs, etc. Initial research using
soil that is the chemical duplicate of the samples taken in the Mars
landers has shown that Mars lacks only a higher water content to raise its
surface temperatures to the human comfort zone and that the soil in that
case will sustain plant growth. The potential is there, but we are missing
the boat.