The earth's atmosphere is essential for the survival of humans, because it allows us to breathe, keeps out the cold of space, and shields us from the Sun's harmful radiation, as well as cosmic rays, small meteors and other dangers from space. However, the atmosphere presents many problems for astronomers, because it causes starlight to scintillate, or twinkle. This is a very similar effect to heat haze, and it comes from pockets of the atmosphere continually changing in temperature and density.
Minimizing the effect of the atmosphere on observations using telescopes makes a huge difference to the quality of the observations. Astronomy is a unique science, in that it is almost totally passive. Humans mostly sit on Earth and collect light, because that is almost all we can do to learn about the Universe. To be an astronomer, you have to be resourceful and extract every bit of data from every particle of light from space. Only relatively recently have we been able to travel into space, and the distance we have traveled is microscopic compared with the distances of the objects we were observing with telescopes.

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