Nuggets from Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny

If such distant-future dreams are by very definition without any value for Earth’s present inhabitants or for those in the foreseeable future, why should we plan and pay for and work toward them? Shouldn’t we rather admit the humbling truth that manned or even robotic “space probes” are impossible outside our solar system? How can we boast of a “space program” that has “human beings . . . headed into the cosmos” when our sun is only one of some 200 billion stars in our galaxy and there could be up to a trillion galaxies?