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C'mon! We could get by on just a little over half as much intelligence that the average gibbon possesses.

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I doubt it. The world could not support the population without the aid of human intelligence. Diseases, hunger, etc. would simply kill us off and we would dwindle down to a few hundred million people if that. Seems like we need all the intelligence we can get.

That said, I grant you that the average person never faces intellectual challenges that affect our species' survival. However, some of us do, and the genes for this person have to come from somewhere. So the genes are spread throughout the population, from which certain individuals are born who do take on these issues. In short, we need a large mass of genes to produce the few of us who do take on these issues.

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What evolutionary purpose is served by our being intelligent enough to send one of our own to the moon?

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If humanity does not learn to colonize other worlds, it will certainly perish. Maybe not tomorrow, but in the context of billions of years its inevitable. Even if we attain a balance of resources, what about things like astroids, gamma outbursts, the fact that the Earth's oceans will eventually evaporate away, etc.