"Let The Planet Hunt Begin" - NASA

Some people do not understand space missions to be an endeavour mandated by the tenets of ecocosmology.

Or that the strategy of space travel is necessary because of the nature of our solar system and our sun.

Ecocosmology states that human space endeavours must fundamentally be a mission to find a home world we can colonize so as to perpetuate the human species.

NASA says this about the Kepler mission:

NASA's Kepler spacecraft has begun its search for other Earth-like worlds. The mission, which launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on March 6, will spend the next three-and-a-half years staring at more than 100,000 stars for telltale signs of planets. Kepler has the unique ability to find planets as small as Earth that orbit sun-like stars at distances where temperatures are right for possible lakes and oceans.

(NASA Kepler, emphasis added). The obvious in that NASA statement may escape some scientists, but the reality is that focused scientists know that we must find another home world or cease to exist as a species.

They know that because they know the Sun will eventually destroy all of the life on this planet.

What we do not know is when the Sun will destroy the earth.

Tenet one discussions point out that the "when" has become more uncertain due to the recent, unexpected, and revolutionary discoveries concerning a star's life cycle.

Thus, the sooner we find other habitable planets with the Kepler mission the better.