Does this mean all the Wikipedia entries on science need spoiler alerts?
Honestly, I’ve had the experience of knowing something nobody else does for awhile (though in cryptography, not something world-shaking involving tides or planets), and it’s kind of a cool feeling. I think part of this is anticipation of improved status, but a bigger part, at least for me, is that this gives me a way to measure myself against something external. If I’m discovering/inventing stuff that nobody else has managed to discover/invent, this gives me a sense that I’m doing a good job.
I agree with the above comment that our motivations for stuff like this are mixed; I love solving the puzzle, I get a bigger charge out of it when the puzzle is hard (but not so hard that I can’t get anywhere on it and give up instead), I like the status of being the guy who did something cool, I like the knowledge that I know something nobody else does (and if I died right now, maybe nobody would figure this out for many more years), and I like the way of measuring myself against the best other people can do. And there are probably other sources of motivation for trying to discover new stuff, invent new stuff, understand things nobody else has ever understood, etc.
I find the parallel with what we want from government help kind-of interesting. Because I’m about 99% certain that I’d rather have fixed rules about how people get help (if you’re unemployed, you get $X per week for N weeks maximum; if you’re seriously poor, you qualify for $Y per week under qualifying conditions Z, etc.) than have some government employee deciding, on a per-case basis, how much I deserved, or (worse) trying to improve me by deciding whether I should be given $X per week, or whether that might just encourage me to laze around the house for too long.
The parallel isn’t perfect—bureaucracies, like markets and legal systems, end up being more like some kind of idiot-savant AI, than like some near-omniscent one. But I think there is a parallel there—we’d probably mostly prefer consistent, understandable rules to our safety nets or whatever, rather than some well-meaning powerful person trying to shape us for our own good.