One of the perks of being at Hopkins is that ever so often you get to visit the Hubble Space Telescope building. It is a stolid building perched atop a small slope on the fringe of the campus overlooking a dense park through which flows calmly a small ravine, or a run, as we like to call it in this part of the world.

There isn’t exactly much to see here, the telescope being in outer Space and all that, but there is a friendly cafeteria with large glass windows serving Central American food. As I sit here sipping my delicious chicken quinoa soup the café folk are trying to rearrange the floor, moving the chairs right and left, trying to move some large trees across the room, not unlike a Charlie Chaplin movie, which I’m enjoying from a safe viewing distance.

And while we go on with our mundane lives, our soup-sipping and our chair-moving, a few rooms away in a small server somewhere, data is being incessantly received from Hubble; images of some distant possibly yet unseen part of the universe, perhaps of a galaxy being born, of a blitzing supernova, a red-shifted quasar, a message from the Foundation. Sauron’s unblinking eye in Space.

Some twenty odd years ago, when I was barely starting school, Hubble was sending down images of it’s magnificent Deep Field. Almost every single blip and smudge in this is a galaxy, and this entire image fits within a dot the size of a pinhead in the night sky! Fortunately my brain cannot comprehend the grandness of this, neither in space nor in time, and I’m but destined to forget promptly and carry on with my daily meanderings.

Where would we be without youtube?