The Best Near-Term Future of Space Exploration?

An anonymous reader writes "Much fanfare has been made about manned missions to moons and planets, but little has been done about travel to the asteroids — until now. NASA is working on plans for a trip to the asteroids by 2025. This type of mission has great potential for positive economic return based on the fact that no effort has to be spent on getting in and out of a distant planet's gravity well. Yes, we should go to the planets, but we should master mining the asteroid belt for resources first because it is easiest. What do you think?"

Comments

Tom

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yes, we should go to the planets..."
No, we shouldn't and we won't. Why not? because we aren't in a science fiction movie. The planets are terrible places to live we shouldn't be inflicting that on anybody, if you think we can just terraform them then you don't have a good grasp on reality.
Here are 5 places we could live which are all about 100 times easier, safer, more habitable and more economic to live:
The middle of the sahara
The bottom of the oceans
The sky
Deep in the earth's crust
Inside volcanoes

But we haven't colonised those, so why would we colonise even worse locations? Lets face it, the highest property values with 10 light years by a factor of a million are where we already live, technology or not.

Re:Welcome to Earth

[afidel]

China has labor but they have a slight problem in that they killed off two generations of their smartest people and decimated any semblance of independent thinking in their academic institutions. They will recover from this but if you think they will overcome it in a decade or two you are delusional.