I was thinking about interstellar colonization, and colonization generally, and how most of our current fictional treatments of it—specifically our explanations for why people do it—are stupid, either trying to terrorize or bribe mankind, and in both cases with lies. On the one hand you have the over-population thing, or other far-fetched, snowball's chance in hell disaster scenarios necessitating the abandonment of Earth; on the other you have warmed-over Tsiolkovskian mystagoguery, the silly idea that merely hurtling through space in microscopic metal tubes instead of on a pinprick-sized lump of rock will somehow grant some kind of spiritual insight. I call the first, as you know, "apocryphal apocalypses"; the latter I think I'll call "epiperipheral epiphanies". (Yes, in this context it's just a twenty-dollar word for "shallow". But it's worth forking over the Jacksons to get the euphonious parallelism.)
Interstellar, incidentally, actually manages to combine the two in one thing: it's got both an apocryphal apocalypse and an epiperipheral epiphany. (Late Addendum: Apparently, that's no coincidence, and the apocryphal apocalypse is actually in service to the—tired, indescribably shopworn—epiperipheral epiphany.)
But neither is valid. Other than a very, very broad "not all eggs in one basket" type of thing (which, again, space-habitats in the Lagrange points, not interstellar colonization), there simply isn't anything scary or urgent enough to warrant an undertaking of the scale of space-colonization (not even of the scale involved in building O'Neill Islands, really). And there really is no God out there—again, not who's not much more conveniently reachable right here. How many of you have genuinely gotten your minds around the fact that space is not "the heavens"? Not as many as ought to have, if the fact this drivel manages to resonate with so many is any indication.
No, the only real reason for space-colonization is "because it's there". And, well, also, "because we're here—and we could just as well be there". All of the stars are suns like ours. It might be wrong to take them from someone else, but if nobody else has claimed one, or its planets—which are all worlds just like this one, not special, as Buridan offended the Peripatetics by insisting—then it does no harm for us to add them to our collection.
Rather than needing a reason for interplanetary or interstellar colonization (coming up with which always requires very far-fetched story-distortions), the actual question is why not to colonize. "More people living more places" is an intrinsic good, and the burden of proof is on him that would deny those seeking after an intrinsic good. The funny thing about humans is that anything they may want is, in and of itself, good—they couldn't want it, otherwise—and any evil attendant on a particular desire can only be circumstantial, through desiring the good in question to the exclusion of higher priorities, or under the wrong conditions. So "a place for humans to live" is, in and of itself, a good, a reason to seek space-habitation, and possibly worth making the necessary sacrifices (provided that one is smart and minimizes the sacrifices necessary—otherwise the good in question will have skipped over into "to the exclusion of higher priorities").
Incidentally, this post's title phrase—which appears not only in Gurren Lagann but as a chapter-title in The Coattails of God: The Ultimate Spaceflight—The Trip to the Stars, by Robert M. Powers—is a book by Fredric Brown, from 1953. It's about an aging astronaut in a future (the 1990s, it was written in 1953) where, after flights to the Moon and Venus (maybe Mars?), all the space-exploration budgets get slashed (tell us again how amazingly prescient Wells' "land ironclads" were!). The guy and a senator basically work together to push through funding for a Jupiter mission. It also predicts the fall of the Soviet Union, another piece of prescience very unusual for science fiction writers till, oh, 1989, and pretty much unheard of in 1953.
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