All of science is worth pursuing because we never know what we will discover and how it will turn out to be useful. Vast arrays of our current advanced technology and industry depend on discoveries at first thought to be completely useless or mere curiosities. There is of course a reasonable debate to be had about the extent to which various endeavours should be funded, but history has shown time and again you can’t pick and choose up front which avenues of investigation will eventually turn out to be important.

For example wandering interstellar objects might seem irrelevant to human life, but we literally discovered one flying through our solar system just a few years ago. It now seems this is a very regular occurrence. These things are shooting past our planet all the time. Maybe not so irrelevant after all. Maybe it would be nice to know more about them, their relative abundance, properties and behaviour, since we live down range in their shooting gallery.