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I think, Alex, that we are stuck in a circular conundrum because of the way we think. To us everything must have a beginning and an end. Therefore we always ask the questions 'where did I come from' and 'where did everything else come from'.
On a personal level I find it hard to quantify the answers to either of those questions. I most assuredly cannot convince my mind to get 'me' to understand the implications and ramifications of them. Ignoring mathematics the concept of 'infinity' is incomprehensible, in my opinion, to a human mind (never mind my own).
In years of yore, Alex, our ancestors felt that anything outside their perception was the realm of the gods. Since then we have pushed our knowledge away from the small area lit by our firelight and found the gods in question mere figments of our imagination. Our frontier (for want of a better word) is now outside even the planet on which we reside.
That's not to say that we understand our own environment as we certainly do not, but nor is that a reason not to expand our knowledge, such as it is, of the cosmos as a whole. Whether our resources should be concentrated on trying to understand our planet before we venture into cosmology or landing humans on Mars is a moot point. One does wonder though, at times, if the term 'get your own house in order first' should apply to us when it comes to spending significant amounts of our ever diminishing resources on extraterrestrial adventures.
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