India Beat Russia to the South Pole. Now What?

> The moon is the first step to becoming a permanent spacefaring civilization.

Can we stop pretending that? It's just marketing bullshit to get people excited about sending people in space. We won't become a permanent spacefaring civilization, period.

Check how far the next star is: quite obviously, without fundamental changes in how we understand physics, we will never get there in any kind of remotely useful way. Sending stuff to the Moon doesn't change our understanding of physics (which we need in order to reach other stars in non-ridiculous amounts of times), we can do that on Earth.

What is left, then, is living in spacecrafts. Apart from the fact that nobody wants that (would be much easier to build a bunker on Earth and live alone there, if that's what you want), we are just not capable of doing it for a few people, let alone an entire "civilization". Actually, our civilization is quite probably about to collapse because we can't even manage to survive on fucking Earth.

Ok, sending stuff/people to the Moon is fun for the people who get to work there. I would definitely throw my principles out the window if I got to fly to space, like many. Let's just stop pretending that's "good for the civilization". It's a fun toy project for lucky people who haven't found a way to use their skills for actually helping us survive on Earth (or who don't give a shit).