Help save planetary exploration

[Sol]

Wow, I'm surprised so many people here think planetary exploration is a waste of time and resources. Take a look at this article:

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/casey-dre...cheap.html

Curiosity had a total cost of 2.5 billion dollars, yes, but it’s not like NASA went over to the Rover Depot, plucked the glamor model off the shelf and whipped out Uncle Sam’s credit card.

No, NASA spread the cost of this mission out over eight years. The money spent went into salaries of highly-skilled engineers, programmers, managers, and independent contractors in over twenty states across the country. Things like the cost of rocket to launch it to Mars are included in that total, too, which accounts for nearly a fifth of the amount.

If you you just divide the total cost by the number of years NASA has saved for it, you come out with about $312 million per year. This works about to approximately 1.8% of NASA’s yearly budget and approximately diddly-squat of the total federal budget. That’s about $1 per year for every American, aka, nothing. Think of it this way: say you lose one dime every month this year. Whoops! You’ve lost more money than you spent on Curiosity.

If you live in the U.S., you paid $8 to explore Mars, to help determine if life ever existed or could've existed or does exist on Mars and to determine if humanity could ever live there themselves. Most of you spend $60 on one video game, so you can probably afford it.

And for those thinking that going to other planets would just "screw things there up too," at this point, the people in the best position to even touch Mars are some of the world's smartest and most skilled scientists, who just sent a rover to check if life even exists there at all. If they find ANYTHING, I'm sure they'll be doing an insane amount of research before sending half the Earth's population over and ruining the planet.

And for people wondering what the point of colonizing other planets would be, here's a really easy example:

A giant asteroid hits the Earth, on par with the one that erased the dinosaurs. No one on the planet would survive. But if we have people on Mars? Humanity continues, at least in some form. And that's a really simple example. That seems worth it, to me anyway.