We're Back! American Astronauts Launched In An American Rocket From American Soil

And it does feed our spirits. Humankind has always thirsted for exploration. We travel to plenty of places on our own Earth that are completely incapable of sustaining life for any significant amount of time. We climb mountains, dive into the depths of the oceans, for what? Certainly not because we need to for food, or shelter, or water. The first sailors that left their fishing grounds and became the first sea explorers, what did they have to gain? And how many of them met watery graves? They could have just stayed home if all we needed was food and shelter. But without them where would we be today? The first aviators had no reason to take to the skies. And how many of them perished or got "kicked in the teeth" before we made aviation safer than almost all forms of ground travel? Before it tied us all together in a way never previously possible? We developed computers so we could calculate artillery trajectories so we could kill the crap out of each other. But then we put them use in exploration and discovery, and made ways of communicating that almost everyone now takes for granted.

Sorry, but we can not possibly know our potential as human beings if we just sit around and worry about food and shelter and chalk everything else up to a waste of time. We are rapidly developing technology that will, in the VERY near future, allow us to leave Earth and live on other planets. If that is within our capabilities, how can we know what our potential is if we don't try? And what about our success as a species? Tied to a single planet, our entire existence is easily wiped out by a rock just hurtling through space. Should we reach the point where people can inhabit multiple other planets, or even solar systems, then as a species our existence has the potential to outlast the span of our current home.

I'm no biblical scholar, but I'm pretty sure the bible covers people that just lay around, focus only on themselves, and never reach their "god given" potential. And I'm pretty sure that's not the example we're supposed to follow.