Perhaps the best motivation for going to Mars is political. It is obvious that no single nation currently has either the will or the resources to do it alone, but a consortium of nations and space agencies could achieve it within 20 years. – Paul Davies
Cosmologists have attempted to account for the day-to-day laws you find in textbooks in terms of fundamental superlaws, but the superlaws themselves must still be accepted as brute facts. So maybe the ultimate laws of nature will always be off-limits to science. – Paul Davies