There are actually many reasons to explore the universe, I'll lay one reason out of a few off the top of my head here.

In all of history on Earth, humans have been the only creature to step into a whole new plane of intelligence. There a lots of intelligent animals, everything from octopuses to chimpanzees, but none of them successfully made that leap to this new plane of intelligence that humans did.

For the first time in history, suddenly there was this new species of animal which could influence things on such a grand scale. Most other species were only confined to influencing their immediate environments, but humans could do far more than ever possible.

Before us, all animals lived and died in hands of nature. Their survival and fate was all up to the changing nature. But we humans are no longer subject to that. We adapted, and we recreated our surroundings to suit us. We were able to prevent disasters from happening before they happened or take evasive actions before disaster struck. We now decided what happens to us, we took fate into our own hands and this set us far apart from other animals.

One of the first reasons to explore and gather knowledge about the universe is simply to ensure our survival. Humans have always been intelligent enough to predict disasters before the stuck, and we know that the Earth is not invincible. There are terrible things out there, everything from comets and asteroids to gamma ray bursts and travelling black holes. As a human, I'll be damned if I see this civilisation and all it's glory go extinct like the dinosaurs because of some stupid rock from space or a reverse-polarised solar wind.

We also know that the Earth cannot be life sustaining forever. As time goes on, tidal pressures will slow down Earth's rotation along it's axis, making the days and nights unbearably long. As the Sun burns off it's fuel and grows in size, our oceans will evaporate and in time Earth will be consumed into the inferno. This may all take a long long time to happen, but it takes a long long time to gain enough knowledge to escape this fate.

We have to explore and gain knowledge so that we can develop the techniques and means to defend ourselves from threats to the survival of our species, civilisation and our way of life. Like humans before us, we have to gain knowledge to take our fate into our own hands.

Of course I care! Just think of all that we've accomplished so far, it'll be real stupid if we were to let 'fate' decide that it's time to end it all.

People didn't go to space out of anxiety, but assuring the survival of the human race and the human way of life is as good a reason as any to spend the billions. As I said, we are a species with unprecedented intelligence, it'll be a shame if we let this intelligence go to waste by dying the way dinosaurs and thousands of other species did, helpless to change their fate.

If humanity ever goes extinct, I'd prefer it to be due to a war we lost to robots that we made (BSG) or due to some massive event like the collapse of galalactic gravity. Even then I still prefer the robot death than the other one, I'd like it to be such that only humans and nothing else can end the human civilisation.

The reason I focus more on the survival aspect of space exploration is because we know for sure that the Earth cannot sustain us forever, we need to start laying the groundwork to be a spacefaring civilisation as it'll take a very very long time for us to reach the level technological advancement needed to colonise other worlds and other systems all while maintaining communications links between colonies the way we have now between countries.

This post has been edited by DeniseLau: Jul 6 2009, 12:55 PM

Not a perpetual human legacy, but perpetual humanity itself. I would like this party never to end, especially because we have the intellect to decide our fate.

It's like you're trapped in a cave which has just caved in and you have a crowbar. If you don't explore space and find for ways to extend our reach and colony it's like you sit in the cave with the crowbar next to you doing nothing and hoping that somehow it'll all be okay in the end. What you should actually do is use the crowbar to pry out as much of the boulders as you can. It's going to be hard since you only have a crowbar, but you cannot sit idly waiting for spaghetti monster to help you.

Sure you might fail a few times, might injure yourself or might die, but you did all that by taking control of your own history.

This post has been edited by DeniseLau: Jul 10 2009, 11:50 PM

Yeah on a personal note, I'm not as keen on deep sea exploration as I am with space exploration.

It's really hard to fight the pressure and the best thing we'll probably find is a new species that'll blow our minds away in terms of how we understand life/evolution/etc.

We should explore the deep seas, but when it comes to budget allocation, I'm going to place priority on space.