How do you know? Maybe the far side of the moon is chock-full of exploitable resources. You can't know until you look.
> but we still looked.
Sure, because we could. We cannot look beyond our light cone.
Tomorrow we might look out at the stars and see the tips of giant teeth. But, probably not.
Yes, we get new data all the time, and the extent of our horizon is growing. But it is always finite. You cannot look backwards past the big bang singularity, and you cannot look forwards beyond "now" for any value of "now".
If you consider a light cone as all points out to infinity then that’s the entire universe. Instead at each point in time you have a different light cone that extends to the age of the universe.
In theory we can never see past a second limit based on the expansion of the universe, but that’s yet to be observed speculation without any consistent theory of what’s going on.
But 200 years ago we “didn’t need” relativity and then we did
Asking questions and wondering about the things we don’t know is how we now know about many valuable things that, in the past, didn’t appear to be valuable
"Barring some major unforeseen revolution in our understanding of physics..."