Metricing our universe through observations provides deatils of its structure, validating models that better help us understand everything.

If humans live long enough, we will also need to pack up as much of the resources left here one day and find a new home, one thta will probably require on the order of hundreds of generations to reach. Knowledge of what is out there, where it is, how it moves and changes is very important to such an endeavor. Much of it will necessaily be predictive since we are seeing things in the past.

It has a tremendous impact. When the distances to stars were first determined, some natural philosophers still believed that the Sun was at the center of the univerese and that the stars were nearby little points of light. But proving that they were so far away proves that they are dim because they are so distant, and that they must in fact be distant suns. This shows that the Sun is only one of billions of similar objects and that we’re not the philosophical center of the universe.

It gives us an idea of how big our universe is, what’s our position relative to other celestial bodies.

we can determine ‘Our ‘ position in the universe, for one. We can determine how far from us = how long to get there.
We can determine their speed = how long since the big bang