Education Quote by Steven Squyres

He starts by swatting away the most predictable heckle: why spend money on Mars when roads and housing are falling apart? The blunt repetition of "It's not going to" is a deliberate act of inoculation. Squyres, speaking as a Mars scientist, concedes the limits of planetary exploration in the language of civic frustration. Potholes and roofs are the shorthand for bread-and-butter governance; he names them to show he isn't insulated from the real world, and to pre-empt the critique that science is a luxury hobby.

Then he pivots, and the pivot is the point. "What it does" reframes value away from immediate utility and toward meaning-making. The phrase "really fundamental questions" isn’t academic fog; it's a claim about the kind of public good science can produce when it’s not pretending to be a jobs program. He’s arguing for a different ledger: curiosity as infrastructure for a culture. Not in the soft, inspirational way, but as a disciplined method for shrinking the unknown.

The subtext is political: basic research always has to justify itself against urgent needs, and the easiest defense is to promise spinoffs. Squyres refuses that bargain. Instead he offers an older, riskier rationale: legitimacy through purpose. The final clause - "by which I mean we can learn how life came about" - snaps the lofty identity talk into something testable. It turns a philosophical itch into a scientific agenda, implying that exploring other worlds isn't escapism; it's a way of interrogating our own origins with evidence, not myth.