Comment 13 by Rawhard Dickins :

Humanity has to be allowed to have a "sharp end" even if some are starving, unfortunately there will always be some on the fringes of survival, it's fundamental to how evolution works. Contraception helps if allowed but we are slaves to the underlying principles.

That sounds like a very heartless acceptance of social darwinism. Darwinistic evolution is a cold fact, but for the sake of our fellow humans we mustn't accept it as a model for our behaviour, an excuse to let the unlucky ones suffer and die. Evolution is blind, heartless and indifferent. We humans are not.

If I believed for one second that funds denied from NASA, CERN or other cutting edge science would go to feed the starving, it would be my human responsibility to fight such costly science. But actually, I believe that science is the best and most effective way to alleviate human suffering in the long run, and science progresses by letting human curiosity flourish. So eventually even this aptly named Mars mission will play some unpredictable part in ending the world hunger and perhaps saving us all from the edge of the precipice we're standing on.