If you "follow the science," as I try to do, the actual purpose of any living species (from humans to plants) is to procreate. The rest of us are "decoration" and/or "entertainment." And, in our current situation, that's great. Every modern society needs its entertainment, because it would, indeed, be very boring if everyone had only their own boring toddlers and teens to pay attention to.
I know that the early Jewish/Christian bible places a premium on procreation, which I used to think was just outdated teachings, contributing to discrimination against homosexuals today. Why do the core texts need to preach about the necessity of procreation, when it's an innate desire? Well, expressly because of the homosexual desire, which could possibly lead to the extinction of the species. Not a likely scenario, since gays like me are a minority of the population, but I can see why homosexuality would be discouraged in Ancient texts.
But perhaps the Ancients foresaw a period, like today, when people are encouraged to have sex randomly, to have abortions randomly, to deny their own genders. They set down the rules thousands of years ago as a warning for a simple reason: The perpetuation of the species, but a controlled perpetuation---not males animalistically mating and then disappearing and forcing the local government to take care of their offspring (or forcing their mates to kill the babies in their wombs out of desperation---or because their government told them it was an "OK" thing to do).
Going back even further: If our planet was indeed propagated by travelers from elsewhere, refugees from a dying/dead planet: Of course one of their foremost tenets that they passed along would be to continue the species. It's something very basic that we're ignoring now because we probably think all these multitudes of people are a given. When in fact, I have a feeling that tens of thousands of years ago, there was a real crisis and a real question of whether or not humans would even survive.
I wanted to end with the above, but there's also something else: I think our ancestors were all refugees/unwilling emigrants separated from our source. There's something obviously wrong with our collective life here, a sense of malaise and dis-ease, that's been only inarticulately enunciated from various quarters for thousands of years. Was Earth initially a dumping ground for criminals/malcontents? I have a gut feeling that there's something at the root that someone is not telling us.
