Interesting justification for colonising the universe. If you were from another civilisation, more advanced, you could see humans as a bunch of parasites taking over planets and destroying other life and themselves in the process.
This grand justification of maintaining the awareness of the universe is a bit of a stretch.
But I guess it would make us an "advanced" civilization.
Which is to say nothing of the riches that await us if we can solve orbital and deep space access problems. If you can get to Mars, you can get to a bunch of asteroids with enough gold and platinum to ensure only the rich will have things made of wood.
I thought space flight is too expensive and unobtanium is yet to be discovered?
Further, even if a group manages to secure trillions of tons of common materials for us today, who's to say it will be given out for free? If it is, well, maybe I want you to give my country a bit more of the share than other countries, or I'll take their share by force. Even if we emerge a united world after something like that, we may find that we've developed far superior technology that has no use for the materials you've acquired.
There are tons of real-world questions that have to be answered, and it doesn't matter if we don't have time to come up with a good one, because someone will pull the trigger first.
The idea that all problems must be solved in some order is naive. There is no order. We don't know what the correct path to future desired social outcomes is, we have what seems to be within reach and we achieve it.
A few hundred years ago and you would have priests declaring the men who spend their leisure playing with wires and magnets, or looking at tiny things through looking glasses are wasting their time - clearly they should be working on getting more blankets and clean air to those suffering from disease!
That doesn’t necessarily follow. In fact one could imagine that earthly problems will provide the stressors to spur us into action.
Lengthy as they are, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy novels are so interesting for challenging that idea, from the very first chapter.
In one category I see the stories of Star Trek and The CoDominium, / The Mote In Gods Eye. Both sets of stories revolve around a militaristic society where, even though there are democratic societies on frontier planets and back on Earth, the only travel between worlds is governed by the ruling group of technocrats who importantly are the only ones with access to interplanetary travel. These aren’t closely tethered warships like we have today: Star Trek plots are notable for the authority, autonomy and power that individual captains and their cadre of officers have. It isn’t explored in depth but Mote implies the CoDominium, the ruling structure on Earth and other worlds, is organized the same way the space faring military is run. Societies with a large military running the country day-to-day are usually considered technocracies (contemporary Egypt, for example.)
In Dune, the Navigators — a separate species evolved from humans — exert the same kind of authority over space travel. The fundamental access to other worlds is in the hands of their technocracy, though the other unevolved humans whose stories make up the main plot lines do so in traditional feudal empires. Maybe Navigators have their own ways of deciding how to run things that shows they are decidedly not technocrats, but to the extent that they control travel between worlds makes them technocrat overlords to everyone else.
Space travel and society in Banks’s Culture novels is much more democratic. Individuals roam in their own ships and all different kinds of societal structures are free to exist in many species and places. However, the over-arching control is still in the hands of the benevolent Minds — sentient supercomputers with a moral code that still allows for some humans to be involved in decision making, but only those humans that have been selected for their elite knowledge and skills. While the Minds have all the power, the humans call a lot of the shots. Decision making by only the most learned and skilled is the hallmark of a technocracy.
(As a teenager I loved this adventure and exploration focus; as an adult, I wish they had explored the Federation as a government and society a bit more.)
I haven't heard of CoDominium before, and The Mote In Gods Eye is on my todo list.
Come to think of it, I could sort of see the "technocrats leaving rest behind" in StarGate series, where most of the off-world activity, including bases on different planets, were actually run by the US military (later a cooperation of militaries and civilian agencies) in secret from the rest of the world.
Out of the relevant books I read, all featured either just human expansion (with no leaving behind happening), or alternatively remnants of humanity going out, with nothing salvageable left behind.
Re-reading your comment, I see you're focusing more on the "technocrats" aspect than "left behind everyone else". Honestly, having grown up watching Star Trek, I'm biased positively towards technocracy - but I guess it worked there because in the society the show portrayed, neither people nor organizations were dumb. Merit actually meant merit.
The problems you mention reach to the very core of human group dynamics. Colonizing space is orders of magnitude easier than solving them. If and when we do solve them, it would make us an extremely formidable civilization.
The people who went all in on what was the new thing at the time have states, cities, islands and whatnot named after thing
Infighting didn't exactly put a damper on the Europeans ability to colonize the Americas and exploit everyone else in the old world. Once we have the technical capacity to colonize other planets I doubt a little infighting on Earth is gonna stop us.