Question: How does researching how the earth started aid our lives in moving forwards in society? When surely we could spend that time doing other experiments and researching into other topics?

Ian Cade answered on 19 Nov 2014:

What do you mean ‘moving forwards in society’? how do you plan to measure what seems to be a fairly nebulous concept?

Your question gives the impression that you think future problems and their solutions can be predicted with perfect clarity… (for example, “we know x, y and z are important problems” and “we know that x’, y’, z’ are the best solutions to thee problems”… how do you propose we might know this?)

Science just doesn’t work like this! A famous quote runs like this:

“If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it?”

Essentially, we can’t predict what will be useful so we just research everything we can. Fortunately, it turns out that a general understanding of the universe is generally useful, and discoveries in one area can have entirely unexpected applications in another.