TITLE: The inverse Galois problem, what is it good for?
QUESTION [76 upvotes]: Several years ago I attended a colloquium talk of an expert in Galois theory. He motivated some of his work on its relation with the inverse Galois problem. During the talk, a guy from the audience asked: "why should I, as a number theorist, should care about the inverse Galois problem?" 
I must say that as a young graduate student that works on Galois theory, I was amazed or even perhaps shocked from this question. But later, I realized that I should have asked myself this question long ago. 
Can you pose reasons to convince a mathematician (not just number theorist) of the importance of the inverse Galois problem? Or maybe why it's unimportant if you want to ruin the party ;)

REPLY [2 votes]: Just to illustrate that the inverse Galois problem in specific cases can be useful.
In my master thesis (2016-2017), I used the inverse Galois problem of cyclic groups over $\mathbb{Q}$ to construct Anosov $2$-step nilpotent rational Lie algebras of certain types. This can help in the classification of Anosov nilmanifolds.