I dislike criticism of the space program, especially those arguments calling it a waste of time and resources, because they fail to follow the chain of benefits strung behind every shuttle launch and probe. Just type the words "benefits of space program" into a search bar, and you'll be confronted with lists upon lists of technologies which either wouldn't exist yet, or wouldn't exist at all if it weren't for the needs and priorities of NASA and other space agencies. Private individuals do not have the same resources and, more importantly, the same motivations as programs funded by public money, and consequently their reach will fall short.

I am also disturbed by the modern perspective on time. Science is a process that consumes decades, centuries even, before its fruits are ripened. Often, what seems useless today will be the bedrock foundation of technologies that we simply could not live without tomorrow. I just pulled up a quote from Michael Chabon that resonates:

"I don’t know what happened to the Future. It’s as if we lost our ability, or our will, to envision anything beyond the next hundred years or so, as if we lacked the fundamental faith that there will in fact be any future at all beyond that not-too-distant date. Or maybe we stopped talking about the Future around the time that, with its microchips and its twenty-four-hour news cycles, it arrived. Some days when you pick up the newspaper it seems to have been co-written by J. G. Ballard, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick. Human sexual reproduction without male genetic material, digital viruses, identity theft, robot firefighters and minesweepers, weather control, pharmaceutical mood engineering, rapid species extinction, US Presidents controlled by little boxes mounted between their shoulder blades, air-conditioned empires in the Arabian desert, transnational corporatocracy, reality television—some days it feels as if the imagined future of the mid-twentieth century was a kind of checklist, one from which we have been too busy ticking off items to bother with extending it. Meanwhile, the dwindling number of items remaining on that list—interplanetary colonization, sentient computers, quasi-immortality of consciousness through brain-download or transplant, a global government (fascist or enlightened)—have been represented and re-represented so many hundreds of times in films, novels and on television that they have come to seem, paradoxically, already attained, already known, lived with, and left behind. Past, in other words.

This is the paradox that lies at the heart of our loss of belief or interest in the Future, which has in turn produced a collective cultural failure to imagine that future, any Future, beyond the rim of a couple of centuries. The Future was represented so often and for so long, in the terms and characteristic styles of so many historical periods from, say, Jules Verne forward, that at some point the idea of the Future—along with the cultural appetite for it—came itself to feel like something historical, outmoded, no longer viable or attainable."

That quote was pulled from an article posted here: http://longnow.org/about/

The Long Now is an interesting project in and of itself, relevant to the discussion. Anyway, I appreciate your link to the poem, but I think that the man is short-sighted. Yes, we are spending resources on things that do not help us short term, but need I really explain why long term planning is important to human success?