Or, more accurately, you can think about it as a different set of priorities.
For instance, someone might want to spend a ten billion dollars of tax money to survey all the ball pits across the world, and accurately count the number of balls in each at precisely the same moment, just to have that knowledge "for its own sake." Is it myopic not to care about that?
A lot of people meet some of their needs for mysticism and meaning with astronomy, but it's also perfectly valid not to use it that way, and instead see it as blurry pictures of places that aren't even theoretically possible to interact with in any way.
> techniques developed for the collection and analysis of such vast datasets find their way back into more quotidian applications.
Which is different from knowledge "for its own sake." Townies with and without imagination will get behind aspects of the techniques, data, products and byproducts that resonate with them. NASA has plenty of examples.
Not necessarily. For one, I'm not talking about being able to articulate some argument for its value, I'm talking about agreeing with that value. To put it bluntly, not sharing that value isn't some kind of personal failure, though a lot of people here seem to mistakenly treat it that way.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-doubt-the...
Neat article, they were asking all the right questions. Calculating how long a coal body could burn, and a mechanism/quantity required to refuel it based on the mass of the solar system
A year or two back I was at a lecture about hummingbirds and the shockingly weird ways they fly and during the Q&A some lady kept asking 'but what's the point of this? Why does it matter?' leaving the lecturer (and everyone else) deeply confused.