Some of this exploration is extremely jumping the gun.
We are barely in the kindergarten stage of space exploration, and hundreds of years away from actually exploring the stars beyond our own system - which leaves five times that hundreds of years in decades, before such information will have an ounce of practicality to human space exploration - leaving amble time for such endeavors in the future.
Meanwhile the practical limits of our current kindergarten stage of actual exploration are starved for funds so much that priorities on those funds limit what we can do to less than what we know we can do.
We should waste less funds on the not-yet-practical and shift all NASA funding to what we can practically do now, and practically do sooner; not what we won’t need to know for hundreds of years.
In 1870 it was said:
We are barely in the kindergarten stage of oil-powered vehicles, and hundreds of years away from actually exploring automobiles...
We should waste less funds on the not-yet-practical and shift all NASA funding to what we can practically do now, and practically do sooner; not what we won’t need to know for hundreds of years.
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It would be very easy to construct a counter-argument, that learning what we can about our galactic neighborhood is more important than scratching around on local solar system rocks.
I want us to do both those things but my only point is you are so sure one is a waste of money and I think if I was at my computer and not on my phone right now I could easily list reasons why space telescopes are the best things to spend our space dollars on at this time in our history.
Whether life exists elsewhere is an important question for many people. I think you’ve been outvoted.