I wrote a whole creative piece last year about how I, too, used to be someone who said shit like “lol why are we spending money on space exploration when we have so many problems here on Earth”

and I can’t wait until it finally gets picked up and published because frankly I don’t have a more eloquent or patient way to tell the people who are still like this that we can work on multiple forms of progress at once, that NASA is the last federally-funded bastion of public engagement with the sciences that this disaster of a country has, and that curiosity should be rewarded