Aside from all the excitement of discovery and broadening our horizons as a species, this is the main reason why I think we should stop fighting endlessly over what in a galactic context are insignificant slivers of territory (cough; the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Kashmir, Taiping Island, etc; cough) and start working seriously to expand our toehold in the solar system beyond Earth.
Catastrophic asteroid impacts have happened here before, and one’s eventually going to happen again. And if we get caught with our pants down so to speak it won’t be very pretty.
