Mars....no cure there.

While you are reading this and should you be a male, look around the room. If there is another male in the room, one of you will get cancer. If you are female and find yourself in a room with two other women, one of you will get cancer. Those are the ugly statistics and have not changed for some time.
Having been a nurse for many years I have seen many wondrous moments and many moments that have shaken my soul. I find that death from cancer as particularly egregious and I have seen my parents succumb to the disease and watched many patients die quite painful horrible deaths from cancer
This makes me wonder why we want to spend jillions of dollars to find water and or life on mars. Additionally, why are we spending good money going back to the moon. Did we leave someone’s watch and we need to go back for it?
There is no one that was more thrilled when I watched the moon landings. I have seen every Star Trek movie ten times. However, I cannot justify in my mind spending money on the fancy of some when we have so many problems here on Terra firma.
Granted, I realize there are tons of jobs involved, national pride and everyone likes to watch the rockets roar. We have realized some gain from spaceflight. However, I would be willing to bet that laying in bed with a tube in every orifice, unable to eat or drink, in pain, delirious and unable to control your body functions you might take pause at the budget for N.A.S.A. The cure will be found here on earth with good basic research, the kind of research that found a cure for polio, vaccine for small pox and diphtheria. Moreover, it will take money to fund that research and I suspect a lot of money. Miracles don’t come cheap and the cure is going to be expensive. Maybe, we can spend a few more billion on research and when we cure cancer then we can go look for that golf ball.