Courtesy of BoingBoing this morning is this fantastic video about what scientists found when they pointed the Hubble Space telescope into the blackest of blacks in space. They were probably told by many that there's nothing there - after all, shouldn't there be at least a few places in space where "nothing" is there? But they didn't listen.
Instead, they believed it was a great experiment - something worthy of human time and effort to see the results - if only for the knowledge itself.
To realize what's out there - that blackness of space is really just faintness of source, and not absence of source, well... it's just what I love most about science and scientists. It is, after all, just knowledge. No one is going to have a better day today because they know this. It's not going to put food on the tables of millions, or change the GDP of the poorest countries in the world. But that's not to say that it's not something that should be done.
Liza's tagline on emails is simple: The Human Race is a relay., and while it took me no time to understand what she was saying, it took me a while to really understand the significance to her, and now, to me.
We aren't all there is. We aren't even really all that important - except to ourselves and those around us. But we are, as a species, the intellectual custodians of this existence. It is up to us to learn, document, and preserve things we see and learn about this life of ours for future generations that might find importance in some little bit of knowledge we maintain.
I got into science, as a kid, from this point of view. Learning and experimenting for the knowledge. Just knowing it was enough. Later, realities sunk in and I had to pay a mortgage, but in the beginning, the purest form of my interest in knowledge was just that - to read, to understand, and to coalesce.
Bless these men and women that to this for all of us.
