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It's only dissonance from the homocentric position of thinking we're the dominant form of matter in the universe. As it is all the parts of the universe relevan
by flukus 7y ago
It's only dissonance from the homocentric position of thinking we're the dominant form of matter in the universe. As it is all the parts of the universe relevant to us are tiny flecks of rounding error in the universe, now we seem to be finding the same with stars. Just like the familiar universe is mostly boring hydrogen and helium in stars, that's now being dwarfed by even more boring matter. It's like when we went from a geocentric view of the universe to a heliocentric one only to discover that the sun wasn't the center of the universe either.
- millstone 7y agoA challenge to this line of thinking is the youth of the universe. Why is the universe ~14 billion years old, in the fleeting Stelliferous era, when we know that red dwarfs will last for ~10 trillion years?
- tremon 7y agoNot sure it's a direct challenge though, it is an open question. Our interpretation of the age of the universe is based on matter interactions and measurements alone. It is an assumption that the big bang produced both matter and dark matter. What if only matter was produced in the big bang, and dark matter existed long before that?
- amluto 7y agoThe normal matter and the dark matter is distributed roughly the same way in space. For example, the dark matter associated with galaxies is in the same places as the galaxies. This strongly suggests that either the dark matter was produced more or less like normal matter in the Big Bang or that it somehow interacted very strongly with other species in the Big Bang. I would be surprised if dark matter predated the Big Bang and survived it in and meaningful sense. I wonder if an theory in which dark matter is conserved during the very early universe is even consistent with observation.
- flukus 7y agoThat's very true, time is the one dimension that earth and maybe one day humanity make up a significant chunk of. But some possibilities are that we're one of the first intelligent species or the anthropic principal, were observing because we can and life later in the universe isn't possible.
- sgt101 7y agoI don't mind at all that matter isn't so important. I just mind that we can't account for most of the stuff that's out there. We have no knowledge of it; does that mean that science is a failure?