Comment by Balgair | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Balgair | Hacker News Reader

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This is based on the current knowledge of physics that we have. We know that it is fairly incomplete.

~5% of the universe is made of the stuff that you, I, a cloud, and the sun are made of. We understand this stuff very well, in terms of cosmic scale stuff.

~20% of the universe if made of dark matter. We know that this stuff falls down and really doesn't do anything else. Does it interact with itself, with us, can we make sandwiches out of it? No clue.

~75% of the universe is made out of dark energy. We know that this stuff makes other things ... fall up (?). Well, kinda, maybe? We're totally at a loss as to what the super-majority of the universe is, let alone what it is doing, or what we can do with it.

Presumably, if there are other intelligences out there, they may know if they can do anything with the other ~95% of the universe and they may be making it into burritos or something. We're a long way away from concluding anything about anything.

It's not impossible that 95% of the universe is boring.

2% of the human body is the brain, and while poetry is written about other body parts, the brain is the one doing all the writing.

Atoms are something like 0.05% electrons, but the interactions and behavior of the electrons account for almost all of the interesting parts, and with notably rare exceptions, the nuclei might as well be point charge/masses.

Just because there is a lot of dark matter and dark energy doesn't mean it will be particularly interesting in the long run.

>Atoms are something like 0.05% electrons

Just in mass. In volume(orbitals), electric charge, importance for chemistry, the proportions are way different.

I mean, that's my point. There's nothing to say it won't be very interesting. We just don't know yet.

I would say that while the above numbers are certainly the current academic consensus, what also is part of the consensus is that this missing matter is interacting weakly and at very high energies. So for all intends and purposes it is mostly irrelevant baring some unforeseen breakthrough that lets us interact with it more strongly (for the same reason everything but the electric force is kind of irrelevant from an engineering perspective).

Only dark energy and matter are just a placeholders really. We aren't sure they exist, we are just seeing that our calculations are off without obvious reason.

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