Another reason why we are here...
To protect Earth/Gaia from getting smacked down by
another big space rock like what happened 65 million
years ago.
She tried to get the dinosaurs up to speed so they could
do the job, but the darn lizards just didn't evolve fast
enough in time (or they did but they had budget cuts
and the resulting impact and long stretch of time covered
up their civilization from us).
Now Earth/Gaia finally got a species with the potential
and awareness to deflect/destroy any and all future
space rocks and keep our world and all its little critters
going and evolving for billions of years more, at least
until the Sun goes red giant or we can figure out how
to stop that or find another place to move to.
And then we go cutting the space budget....