Question: Why are people busy studying space and dark matter and fighting in wars and stuff when illness's and Cancer tumers are harming so many people?

Hayley Evers-King answered on 18 Mar 2013:

You’d probably be surprised by how many spin-off technologies have come from research that you might not think is important or useful. NASA is probably one of the best examples of this – artificial limbs, thermometers for measuring body temperature, MRI scanning and heart pumps are just a few of the things that NASA technology has created or contributed too. They are also responsible for projects based in space that help us create secure food and water supplies for people – very important I’m sure you’ll agree. Dark matter and our understanding of physics as a whole is vitally important for potentially producing new types of energy – one of the greatest problems that faces us today.

Unfortunately even if we all wanted to research illnesses such as cancer, there doesn’t really exist the research funding for this. And I’m not sure if having many more scientists working directly on the problem would really help. You might find that the cures for cancer come from places you don’t expect – for example, many tropical forest plants have been found to be useful as medicines – without botanists and geneticists to identify and study these plants, we may never know the full extent of their uses.

I’m not sure why people are fighting in so many wars though to be honest, that makes me very sad too.