Why Is The Goal Important?

A lot of times I see people working frantically to promote or denounce ideas like they're the most important thing in the world.

We need faster computers!  We need longer lifespans!  We need less pain!  We need more people to know the truth!  We need less people to disagree with us!  We need less manual labor!  We need our species to continue indefinitely!

All of these ideas are well and good.  But WHY are they good?  Ecclesiastes teaches us that despite all of our hard work, the universe is going to carry on regardless.  Did the universe NEED life to survive during its first however many billion years?  Nah.  So why does it need life now?

The list of needs I described above are actually really nothing more than preferences.  I know I certainly want a longer life for me and my friends where we aren't suffering crippling diseases.  And I would like to think that my life will have some small positive influence on humanity for generations to come.  And most sensible people would feel the same way.  But the cold hard fact is the universe doesn't need it.  It doesn't need us to have utilitarian laws that will be better for the prolonging of our species.  It doesn't need intelligent life or protozoa even.  I imagine it's fine just being floating rocks and gases.  Or even just a plain old big crunch singularity.

Once we recognize that all of these things we are being pressured to achieve are really just preferences more than necessities, the urgency behind them is no longer quite so urgent.  They're not really urgent at all on a universal scale.  Only a preference scale.  This revelation has some liberating properties but it is also accompanied by a lot of emptiness.  It's easy to feel worthless when you realize you aren't needed.

Some people accept that nothing we ever do has any inherent worth, but I think most do not.  I think most people either turn to religion or try to plan out how our species will continue to evolve into more complex lifeforms that will survive forever, perhaps even preventing a big crunch.  The latter seems sillier than the former to me, but that's just a personal preference.

I've often questioned the goal of evolution.  Why the drive to survive?  Why the drive to procreate?  Why adapt to anything when the universe doesn't need you to do it?  I believe these important questions are usually left unanswered.  They are certainly outside the realm of science because all science can do is draw conclusions from fossil records.  But why get so concerned about finding the truth if all it does is lead you to an unsolvable axiom?  Are you seriously not going to ponder that axiom at all?  You REALLY want to discover the exact details about how life formed over the centuries, but never get the least bit curious about why the universe set this evolution of more and more complex lifeforms in motion to begin with?

I study physics all the time and I still ponder over and over again why something can move indefinitely without energy unless a force stops it.  Granted it doesn't make me much money to do so.  Still, I can't help being curious..