TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Lawrence Krauss poses a good question about space exploration—for what purpose?—and seeks to answer it:

For example, every time I see a Hubble Space Telescope photograph showing hundreds of galaxies, each containing billions of stars whose light has taken billions of years to travel to the Hubble cameras, it inspires me to ponder whether they may have been surrounded by now-frozen planets harboring long-dead civilizations.

And closer to home, I have to admit that I am in love with Curiosity.

Something that’s been fundamentally true as long as we’ve been around is that humans seek to understand why things are the way they are, to understand the world we live in. We’ve always wondered what lies beyond that next mountain range, or on the other side of that ocean, why the sun rises and sets, what are the stars in the night sky.

We’ve answered many of the big questions, but there’s still much we don’t know. Some of it is here on Earth, deep in the oceans or under the Earth’s surface, but much of what we don’t know lies in the rest of our solar system and beyond. There might not be many direct, short-term economic benefits to further exploration, but those will certainly come in the future. Most important, though, is we will continue to explore, expand our knowledge of why the universe is the way it is, and so keep us moving toward greater knowledge and a greater future. I believe that setting our boundaries at orbiting our planet, never to go beyond, will also set limits on our hopes for a better world tomorrow and our ambitions to create it. After all, if we’ve decided that we won’t go any farther than we have into the greatest unknown left, why would we dream to continue pushing boundaries here at home? Why wouldn’t we settle down and enjoy the benefits of the human race’s collective efforts thus far, rather than toil for something new?

Humans are driven by the unknown and all the possibilities it entails. Continuing to explore our boundaries creates the conditions for our ambitions and successes. I don’t think that’s a design flaw—I think it’s a feature. We’re never satisfied with what we already know and have already done, and I hope we never are.