Earth is an incredibly tiny part of the universe. Comparing it to a speck of sand on the beach would be outrageous. That speck of sand is much much much larger relative to the beach, than earth is relative to the universe. Now in this universe, there are a bunch of components and rules and things. Physics, math, astronomy, anthropology - these are studies of different parts of these rules and components, but as it turns out they are all deeply related. Discoveries in one field ALWAYS (not sometimes, always) have implications in every other field. Sometimes, the implications aren't apparent, and maybe don't become that way for a long long time. In history there have been lots of crazy situations like that - people putting salt on their meat or freezing it to stop it from rotting in storage "because it worked" long long before advancements in microbiology and chemistry explained why it works. Then once they know why salt worked, they found some somethings that were better than salt at preserving food. Advancements in any area of study promote advancements in other areas. On top of that, many many things that have been discovered or learned about our universe are happy accidents. The discovery of penicillin is a pretty classic example. Trying to learn some things about microbiology and how microorganisms grow, and accidentally leaving the experiments out, lead to one of the most important advancements in modern medicine. So much of what we know about the universe is theoretical, approximate and simply "stuff that we are going to go ahead and assume is true because we haven't been proven wrong yet". So much so that sometimes trying something simply because it hasn't been tried before can lead to exactly the right unexpected result to force us to totally re-evaluate our understanding of what happens around us. On top of that, space has a particularly unique advantage. Earth is objectively tiny, and yet most of the fields we study are pretty limited so the stuff that we see happen on Earth. Out in space, there are things that never ever happen on Earth, and they are on a MUCH MUCH grander scale. The grand scale is the important part here. When it comes to mathematics, there are lots of things that can seem true, until you start to test them with numbers at a massive (or incredibly tiny) scale. "But instead of actual numbers, what if we used infinity?" is a question that sorta shatters a lot of mathematics. If you were going to try to apply those mathematics to the physical world it gets very difficult to visualize or simulate - using numbers so grand they are effectively infinite is much less simple or intuitive than using numbers like 2. Fortunately, just out in Earth's back yard, there are countless physical examples of those numbers on grand scales. You've got things like black holes and huge galaxies, stars moving towards us and away from us incredibly fast. For centuries, people have been looking to space to answer questions about the inherent properties of the universe because of this. Our understanding of energy and matter (so everything) has been incredibly shaped by astronomy and cosmology. Before we even got a piece of man-made material to space, the changes in the night sky have been allowing great human minds to understand the world around them. On top of THAT, earth is a limited resource. Different people have different clocks on it depending on their theory on what will be "The End of the World" but the fact that it is an eventual inevitability is pretty much indisputable. No matter how you shape your argument, there will be a point where the human race will either - a) already be gone b) go to space or c) die with the earth If humans are around long enough, somewhere that isn't earth (and probably isn't this solar system) IS the endgame. Advancing our understanding of space over time, as our kind grows and develops greater knowledge, is inherently advantageous for this reason. On top of that, earth is a place of infinite discovery. We will never ever know everything there is to know about earth. Life forms existed and disappeared that we may never "discover". There are means of discovering some of those lifeforms that disappeared that we haven't discovered, I'm sure. There are lifeforms so deep in the ocean that they'll probably never get discovered, because, despite popular belief - oftentimes going really really deep underwater is much much much more difficult and expensive, and requires much more deep understanding of physics, than traveling to space. Mostly because the extreme amount of pressure is really hard to do stuff in, compared to the vacuum of space. It's not that the oceans don't have tons of people dumping metric balltons of money into researching and understanding them, it's that we literally don't have the technology (read: a deep enough understanding of math, mechanics, physics, and materials) that we'd need to discover lots of things about the ocean (much like space). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now this is going to get all weird and analogy and stuff so hopefully it's not too convoluted. Think about humankind in the universe like they are a character in a bad MMO, which will represent human progress sorta. In this (very bad) MMO, the only real way to acquire levels is to raise your skills. The skills you have probably won't surprise you Physics Math Cosmology Chemistry Anthropology Biology etc etc etc you get the point You've got a shitty-huge amount of different skills in this MMO, but luckily advancing one skill gives you bonuses to all your other skills - "You leveled up chemistry by making a small discovery about mercury. +10 chemistry, +5 physics, +1 math, +1 cosmology, +1 culinary arts." On top of that, there are certain skill barriers that require you to get other skills up to prerequisite numbers - "Cannot adequately train in Biology, skills in Optics and Chemistry are too low for microbiology research. All gains in Biology will be reduced to 25%. They will return to normal when Optics is 400 and Chemistry is 250. (gotta build a microscope, son)" Sometimes, when you are leveling a skill, you'll hit a new tier, giving you massive bonuses to lots of other skills. The problem is, you can't see these tiers until you get to them, so you want to be careful not to neglect any area too much. What if you are wasting all your time trying to get your Biology to 500, when it turns out that 2 more levels in Chemistry would get you an instant +200 in Biology? Now here's the shittiest part about the MMO. You have no idea what max level is. You can put incredible amounts of time into any one skill, and the only caps you hit are soft-caps (like the Biology example above). You never hit something like "You have reached 2,500 in Physics, there is nothing left for you to know about Physics." You can just keep grinding and grinding away at all of your skills. There is one thing that you do know, though - There is some endgame content out there, and it involves space. Right now when your character tries to go to space, there's no fun endgame content. He just kinda drifts around in the black, leveling Cosmology and sometimes finding some really interesting stuff that levels up things like Chemistry and Optics and Astronomy and Physics. But even though you're not finding anything really exciting and endgame-y out there, your character knows he'll eventually need a really high Cosmology level. Also, the only real way to advance in the MMO is to gain skills, and while leveling Cosmology he usually ends up leveling up a lot of other skills. He's even had Cosmology unlock a few hidden tiers, giving massive upgrades to Physics and Chemistry. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The line of thinking that, because it isn't on Earth - it doesn't TEACH us anything about Earth, is very short sighted. So is the idea that, because it is not strictly necessary to know about space - we shouldn't bother trying to know about space. Some of humanities most important advancements ON EARTH started because of some shenanigans they saw in the stars, or out of their desire to see even crazier shenanigans in even further stars. Space may not be the end-all-be-all yet, but it has the potential to become that. We have no idea what the limits of our knowledge are in ANY area. We can dump infinite research hours into goddamn near any subject and never have a complete understanding of it. So to look at our skills and say "I think that we need to research earth way more before we even start worrying about space" in our MMO analogy would sound like... "Well right now all of our Earth Science skills (biology climatology anthropology geography etc etc etc) are all pretty high, but they could be higher. I'm on Earth, so I think they should all be really really high. So I say we learn a bunch more things in all those. I don't know what their cap is, so I'm going to arbitrarily set one.... uhhh. 2750. Once we get to 2750 in all of our Earth Science skills, we will know a sufficient amount to think about looking into the other areas. At this point in time I have no idea what 2750 implies, because I cannot see any tiers until I unlock them. I have no clue how close it is to the max level. I have no idea if any of the space science skills have hidden tiers that will give me a bunch of skills in Earth Sciences, or maybe just skills in areas that will allow me to more quickly level in Earth Science. Regardless of all these things I'm hoping aren't in space (because if they are I'll have wasted countless hours trying to find them on Earth), all of these guesses I'm making about how far along our knowledge is about our planet, all of the past evidence from leveling one area and gaining knowledge in every single other area, and the extraordinarily huge possibility that it will be the most important skill in the endgame - I think Cosmology is a silly skill and we shouldn't touch it." And that's not good. This is why I think there is a whole lot of value in trying to understand EVERYTHING around us, be it big or small, close or far. Everything we know about stuff translates into knowing things about other stuff. There shouldn't really be subcategories of stuff that we decide are negligible. If we told people thousands of years ago that they should "really look into finding out if there are a bunch of living things that are so small that we can't see them. And then we should see what they are doing to us.", it would have seemed like a very negligible area of research. Luckily, thanks to advancements in other areas, we did find out about those tiny life forms. Turns out they're incredibly important! - furthering our understanding of medicine, evolution, and biology in general. Who could possibly know if, and when space could be one of those 'other areas' - something we could make an advancement in so huge it changes the way everyone thinks and acts. Taking a guess that all of the important things for us to learn right now are here on Earth, our tiny speck of beach sand, is just incredibly restricted.