why do we care about stuff that is billions or light years away when we're never gonna get there?

Cause Curiosity made us come down from the trees. And curiosity proved to be a good survival strategy.

By approaching light speed close enough, you can actually get anywhere in the universe in what seems like just a few years to you (the traveler). Of course if you came back to Earth it would be long gone, as billions of years would have gone by here.

Plus there may be ways to jump around in space like some theories have suggested. Who knows what we will discover in the future, but we will never learn if we don't at least try.

Not only are we curious, but when we see things so many billions of light years away, we are seeing things as they were billions of years ago, in a sense giving us a "glimpse into the past"

Cos Curiosity is part of human nature. Also studying distant parts of the universe can tell us many things such as info about the big bang.

There are people who believe in knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself. They need to know the hows and whys of things simply because they want to add to the scientific knowledge that others have compounded.

because if we understand how things work, we can create new technologies that will hep people now and in the future. if we didnt know how gravity actually worked from our freind einstien, we wouldnt be traveling in space much. and if we werent traveling in spce, we would never have discovered how to make certain medicines that can only be made in zero gravity. so ask those people who depend on those medicines to live, why it matters so much. i hope this helps!!!!

That's just it. We ARE going to go there. It is only a matter of time. We will come up with the technology and it will be in the next 50 years. We need to know about where we will eventually be going.

It does matter. We can still lie about landing on a star a billion light years away. Dummies believed landing on the moon c r a p...!!!

It's an academic exercise. Remember they're just looking at random and in the university environment, it's publish or perish. You gottaa write papers to kep your job.

it's because of curiousity...

and the hope to find some thing useful...

We can find new things, useful to mankind, by seeing and understanding Nature and It's activities...