Why outer space and not inner land?

Countries are investing billions of dollars and rupees into space research. There are really large institutes and organizations backed by the government of respective nations doing study on outer space. Some of the research has helped us form the "Global village". Satellites beam pictures of remote places and have contributed in shrinking the world. We now know where exactly is a mineral found and where to explore for oil. But there are some useless stuff also (Today it seems useless to me...may be tomorrow it may be different). A specialized robot is made to land on Mars. This project took I don’t know how many billions. Whatz the point?

We have not invested enough to know what is happening below us. There are no specialized rich organizations to do this. This is costing us not only billions of rupees in aid but lakhs of people also. Though there are claims that tsunami and earthquake prediction is possible, there is only one instance so far where the prediction has worked correctly (this was in 1970 in China, if I remember correctly). There have been many hoax predictions. The problem is that we have not invested time and money to study our mother earth. So technology to predict these is not available. Whenever a disaster of the magnitude of Tsunami - 2004, there is lot of media coverage on such technology. But then when the dust settles down, the talks and the money for the technology goes into the coffin.

I feel people on earth are more important than the life on Mars or aliens elsewhere. Its time to think and start. We need to strike a balance between the two.