I’m not saying that all this space stuff is not hugely impressive. Nor that it hasn’t provided thousands of spillovers of value down in the real economy. It has kept thousands of brilliant physicists hard and creatively at work for the past five decades.

But when you do the boring cost-benefit analysis, it is hard to reconcile the billions diverted to this charismatic science, while starving research to understand our much closer deep oceans, or how we might better understand, and reduce, the catastrophic harm caused by extreme weather, or more accurately mapping the impacts of climate change across the world.

Nasa’s space exploration budget for 2019 is US$21.5 billion, a 3.5 per cent increase over 2018, while the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, at the heart of US efforts to understand the oceans and climate change, was allocated just over US$5.5 billion, an 8 per cent cut.

Our obsession with space, which has perhaps been amplified by growing anxiety over the Earth’s capacity to survive human impact, means increasingly preposterous and costly projects have been tabled.

China’s Circular Electron Positron Collider, an underground circular tunnel, about 100km in circumference, would be bigger and more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider. It would hurtle particles at close to the speed of light and get them to smash together, releasing for milli-fragments of a second Higgs bosons and other subatomic particles. No one yet knows where a 100km underground tunnel might be built, or how much it might ultimately cost. Remember, Europe’s collider took a coalition of 23 countries 30 years to build.

A further frustration for me is that all of these fantastically expensive projects are justified on two grounds: first, they will help us understand how the universe/solar system/Earth was formed, and, second, they will help us discover extraterrestrial life. I would love to know how many billions have been spent over the past half a century on the unsuccessful effort to discover that we are not alone.

On the second question, I too am fascinated by Enrico Fermi’s “paradox” – the surprising absence of evidence of extraterrestrial life given the size of the universe. With 200-400 billion stars in the Milky Way – each with their own families of planets – there ought statistically to have been many thousands (perhaps millions) of civilisations eager to chat to us. Yet the total silence speaks a thousand words – and provides a fragile basis for still more multibillion-dollar space probes.

While there may be sound scientific explanations to answer Fermi’s paradox, perhaps there is a simple compelling economic one. Any halfway civilised population several dozen light years away with enough common sense to be concerned, above all else, with protecting the security and prosperity of their own “people”, and concerned that they don’t exterminate themselves by leaching their resources dry, might forego efforts to spend billions on multi-generation expeditions to discover perhaps unfriendly neighbours.

Can we please bring scientific priorities back down to Earth?

David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view