Sometimes having the answer isn't important, but being able to figure it out is important. In elementary school, we'd always get math problems where we really didn't care what the answer was. Sally would have 8 apples, Peter would eat 3, and you'd have to figure out how many apples Sally had left. Sorry, but I don't care about Sally at all, let alone how many apples she had. For all I cared, Peter could eat all the apples, seeds and all, and die of cyanide poisoning! Learning how to do subtraction, though, was invaluable. There's also been a lot of experiments that didn't seem important at the time, but later on turned out to be really useful. Post-It notes were considered a failed glue experiment. Do we have to create problems that don't exist in nature? I think it's imperative that we do. We can not anticipate and be proactive if we don't imagine what is and what could be. We may also find that some of those "non-existant" problems do occur in nature, just not where we expected or how we expected. Interesting post, but it fits better in the Off Topic Forum instead of Writers' Forum. This forum is for story and poem ideas, not philosophical questions. (Yes, poems and stories can pose questions and morals, but the words wrapped around the idea are also important.)