So here’s an interesting bit of news for you this fine morning, folks–seems that there are some folks out there who think that the Hubble telescope, among others, is contributing to making life as we know it MEANINGLESS.

They’re calling them “life-shrinkers”, and some folks think that, by talking about the universe at large, showing us how phenomenally vast it is, it makes humanity look, well, meaningless by comparison.  This in turn leads to folks thinking that life is just a big accident and whatnot, further reducing the significance of man.

Well, I’m not personally one of those people, but I can see where their logic is.  I mean, it’s kind of hard to think of the folks across the street as significant–to think of YOU as significant–when there are things going on out there that are so phenomenally big that not even LIGHT could travel fast enough to see it in less than a century.  But to refuse to see them?  Because we’re afraid it could screw with our own sense of importance in the universe? That’s not just naive, that’s the most egocentric thing of all.  It doesn’t MATTER what awesome things Hubble shows us.  We’re still as important as we were before it, and we’ll be that important after it.  Einstein called it.  Check THIS out:

“What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know an answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it make any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer:  the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life.”

So it doesn’t matter what Hubble gives up.  At the end of the day, we are what we are, not what we do or what we see.  Just what we are.  And existence makes anything significant.