Torkuda said:
We haven't even managed to leave the solar system and we have folks convinced that we know precisely what happened during the first ten seconds of the universe six trillion years ago, and declaring you uneducated when you say "yea... no.". I'm sorry, but can we NOT make scientists the new gods?
While there's nothing wrong with questioning scientific discoveries/ideas/knowledge of your day (this is how science gets done after all), doing so while demonstrating a complete lack of knowledge of what they actually are is kind of silly. Not only do you not seem to know or care what the actual ideas of our time are, you can't even be bothered to look up the bottom line of what they say (for example, a simple, easily-found number like the age of the universe), while suggesting that people who make this sort of thing their life's work have no better an idea than you, or anyone with similar disinterest in doing actual work instead making stuff up.
I imagine your response to that might be that scientists make stuff up too. That's certainly the case in the movies. But movies aren't a reliable source of information on how things actually work. Actual scientists know that making stuff up is a good way to end your career, or get denied your degree. The whole point of a thesis defense in grad school is for you to demonstrate that you can do sound research that does not rely on assumptions or oversimplifications. If you make stuff up or base your work on assumptions without doing any actual research on what current thinking actually is, you won't even make it to the defense before people find out and ask you to leave. That's actually how and why most non-mainstream ideas get dismissed; people didn't do their research. Same goes for ideas from outside academia that try to compete with those from within. Those that survive close scrutiny become the new mainstream, as long as politics don't get in the way. Even then, given enough time, people eventually come around.
More on-topic, for one thing, NASA's budget is a tiny part of the federal budget, and astronomy is a tiny part of that. You may want to refer to this chart: http://xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-9329&y=-2031&z=6
I know that on the surface (pun actually not intended), space might seem like a long way from here and of little importance, but that's because you frankly don't know that much about it, or what there is to study, or what there is to use there. I work with people who use satellite-based remote sensing data to predict whether there will be enough water to feed people both domestically and abroad, or enough shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico to keep the coastal economy going. I use it to improve warning information on natural hazards. Some of these people are worried about what's going to start happening to our ability to track hurricanes when our current satellites go offline, which they will soon, without any firm plans to replace them.
A more dramatic example of what use astronomy is is also the most ridiculous. It's 2013 now, 19 years after Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter (wow, I feel old now) and we've known about the threat of impacts for all this time, yet we still have no realistic plan to set up an adequate early-warning and mitigation system for asteroid impacts. Most discoveries of dangerous objects sound like this: "Oh, good thing that asteroid we discovered as it passed by didn't hit us". We had one of those a couple weeks ago. Earlier this year the Russians got a "Good thing that asteroid that we discovered as it exploded above our heads wasn't bigger". This state of affairs is shameful, and part of the reason we find ourselves in it is because astronomy and space science are at the mercy of people who don't know what it is or what it's good for.