Can space exploration solve Earth's problems?

[Kyng]

Every time a new space mission launches, people look at the cost (which typically runs into the millions of dollars) - and they ask: "Couldn't that money be better spent solving problems on Earth?". And it's an entirely fair question - so, to address it, I thought I'd start this thread.

To get us going, this article, from Medium, gives us some suggestions:

• Climate: Satellites give us all kinds of data on greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, ocean health, and so on.
  
  
• Energy: Solar power satellites could, one day, collect clean energy and beam it back to Earth from space.
  
  
• Disease prevention / Healthcare: Satellites can track outbreaks of diseases in real time (like, for example, World Health Organization’s Malaria Atlas Project). Furthermore, experiments on the International Space Station have led to breakthroughs in tissue engineering and drug development (taking advantage of the microgravity environment to develop new treatments).
  
  
• International relations: Complex missions involving multiple nationalities require international co-operation. Once these missions have succeeded, this spirit of collaboration can be applied to other areas.

So, does anyone have any other suggestions as to how space exploration can help to solve problems here on Earth?

[ZandraJoi]

I don't mean to be all doom & gloom lol I want to be optimistic but all the advancements so far have only helped the rich & make the rich even richer!
I only think it could solve the Elites, the rich's problems. You know they won't include others. The "little guy". I say that because with all the advancements it comes with a price. To find the advancement & then to put said advancement out there. Regular people cannot afford it. Drugs are still sky high even with insurance. Even real, organic food is expensive.
For the Climate, it won't help as it's human destruction in the first place. Humans will still cut down trees to plant invasive crops so having a satellite image showing deforestation won't stop the human's greed. We still pollute. We still only look out for Number One.

[Pyrite]

I have first hand experience of this as I'm shortly commencing a project that will directly support a satellite mission that is scheduled to start in a couple of years. It will be related to monitoring the climate, taking new measurements that will vastly reduce current uncertainties in climate models. This is crucial as right now model projections can be extremely uncertain in terms of the scale of the upward trend in global temperatures.

[slooroo]

On the international relations side I think it'll eventually make things worse instead of better in either direction. If we keep the fractured, multi-nation Earth we have now then I fail to see how we won't just repeat colonialism and the fights that came with it but in space. If we form a one world government (say like the Earth Federation in Gundam) in order to direct space exploration and colonization as a team then you still risk forming an Earth human vs space human divide that can still cause conflicts.