science

Actually, space civ or anywhere else for that matter will serve as an excellent research lab experiment to solve Earth's problems.

I'm not in favor of the tech bro++ oligarchy at all, and I believe this is going to get a good bit worse before it gets better for a specific reason of what will happen after the first M-type asteroid in NEO is successfully mined.

One must look at the situation on Earth from an uninvolved 3rd party perspective. Everything humans do is just a form of complex social hierarchy like any other animals. The primary form if display is the barbaric primitivism of collecting the fundamental means of survival; wealth. There is little incentive to display in other more advanced forms like reputation (academia/film industry), or merit (Olympics/military), within the broader population. One can behave terribly and ameliorate a massive share of the real cost using the environmental container to distribute the tax. In space, that is simply not possible. Sustainability is only possible within the elemental cycles. Existence becomes the driving factor. The economy of social hierarchy instead shifts to more advanced forms such as merit and reputation. The most fundamental resource and struggle becomes the heat budget in most instances. This fundamental shift is very important to future history as it creates the technology and engineering mindset that the environmental container is not a valid unlimited resource. Once the technology exists at smaller scales in space, it can be implemented at greater scale on Earth. The financial burden to iterate this tech and refine it to the point where it can be practical on Earth with little cost increase is simply not viable at all, not even for government programs. The big difference is M-type asteroids. Few talk about this, but elemental resource scarcity on any round planet is due to gravitational differentiation. The moment humans access a large M-type astroid (the core of a differentiated planetesimal that has broken up), all wealth accessed in the Holocene is basically irrelevant. The moment that happens, within a generation there will be space colonies. Everything else happening in space is basically taking this into context. Japan in leading the way on prospecting and mining exploration at the moment. They are the most relevant group to watch at the moment.

Scientific advancement in space experimentation leads to breakthroughs in other areas - all scientific progress is interconnected.

"Pushing science towards solving the most immediate and important problems" is sort of a nonsense statement, as there could be new efficiencies/strategies that are discovered in fields that are completely unrelated to what would normally be associated with "the most immediate and important problems."

We have many many scientists working on "important problems".

We do not have a deficit in research or curiosity, we have an issue with people willfully implementing policy that is detrimental. (Power, Profit, willful ignorance, intending to hurt others, etc)