why is space travel important to us?

The Earth will soon be full. We need more places to live.

its not, but protecting our national security is...weapons in space, spying on our enemies, star wars, you know that kind of stuff

we have a need to ake sure our race survives and the only way to make that happen is to make sure we live on other worlds, and not just earth.

the human mind's goal (especially the white mans) is to advance and create to make life easier, along the way a guy went to the moon and now were going to mars...

sides space travel would be cool... and being cool is whats important to us!

The Earth's population is increasing so rapidly and we are using up our resources and polluting the environment to the point that we will need additional places to live.

If we could stop the growth of the population, stop destroying the rain forests, using up our non-renewable resources, and polluting the atmosphere, we could keep the Earth livable.

However, in order for the human race to continue, we will very likely need to colonize other planets. It will take a long time and space exploration to enable us to do this.

to learn about the universe

to find potential places for us to live when earth is destroyed

maybe we can find alternative fuel sources

i imagine that production plants on seperate planets would be useful, less gravity means less work would be done means cheaper weaker machinery could be used (question is, do we save money doing that and transporting stuff back, or does the transportation cost more?)

low gravity could be useful for conducting experiments.

we want to, its a challenge, and we want to do it, to prove to ourselves we can

to feed our curiosity

because some day, our resources will run out, and if we don't have alternative fuels, then we will need more resources

some day, we will be overly populated, and need to either stop people from having kids, kill people, or colonize a distant planet or build a huge space station

someday, something will destroy the earth, we will need a new place to live, probably in a different solar system, if not a different galaxy even

discovering things is cool

the mars race, in the next few years, it will probably be the focus of every space administration that thinks they may have a shot at it.

i'm done, basically, outerspace is awesome and there is so much more stuff to discover and so many more answers to so many more questions than on earth

Im posting this to counter some of the answers posted here in reference to human populations on Earth: there is an energy source that will last as long as our Solar System will. The sun. And it provides more than enough energy than we could ever use. Surely we will find new ways to harness this energy. Secondly, human population will harness itself. If we did fail to use the energy appropriately and our population reached levels far beyond our abilities to support ourselves, we'd experience a die off of humans. We arnt that far removed from nature and animals, and our populations are goverened by similar principles. We've been able to achieve incredible dominance by our advance in technology, but make no mistake, we are susceptable to the same laws of nature. Its not as if we breach a certain level, all human life dies out. A number die out until balance is restored. Certainly war will be a major factor in our decline as opposed to starvation and disease, which are typical controls in animal populations. People misunderstand the Earths ability to go on. We think we are destroying Earth, and we may be. But Earth has experienced disasters beyond which we can even imagine and life has gone on. Natural Resources will exist as long as the Sun does. Humans could cause a disaster which could force us to leave the planet, but sheer population increase, while dangerous to population and quality of life, is not overly dangerous to human life on Earth itself.

For the same reason Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492 was important.