Sysreq2

Let’s side step for a moment and talk about mythology. People conceptualize it as like Greek gods, Biblical tales, etc. From a sociological stand point however it is much more broad. We engage with mythology every day, we often just don’t know it. When you receive a bill from your power company, it is myth that the company in question is an entity, that your money has value, or even that you must respond. None of these things are objectively true - a power company is not a real thing after all, just something we all made up and agree upon. Myths exist within groups to allow complex functioning and social harmony. They exist to unify and orient. But they are never real no matter how hard you believe.

Dark matter, I believe, is one such example. It’s a proxy for lack of knowledge, no different than rain spirits being called to water the crops. It orients and aligns, allows people to continue without the weight of the unknown burdening them.

As I stated above, that doesn’t mean fake, or conspiratorial, any more than taxation is a conspiracy to steal your money. These beliefs are just tools we use as humans to lubricate interaction and establish agreed upon norms. Everything from the Law, to Philosophy, to things like Human Rights are mythological. That doesn’t mean they are wrong or immoral, but it doesn’t make them true either. Humans, objectively, only have the rights we communally grant them.

When you drive your car you choose to follow the rules of the road. To do otherwise is both foolish and dangerous. We all agree on them and act in accordance. At any moment though, someone could swerve and kill you - even while you sit in your office or walk down the street. We just tend to not think about that unfortunate truth because of the burden it would entail. That is mythology working.

It’s doesn’t change reality though.

Aristotle believed that all objects desire to be in their natural state. Throw a rock and it aims to return to the earth. Burn some twigs and the fire eventually stops. And the natural state of any object is at rest.

Every piece of evidence for hundreds of years proved this point. Every scientist knew it to be true. And yet I ask you today, does an object in motion desire to rest OR does it stay in motion until acted upon by an outside force?

It wasn’t until later that people had the tools to say, hey, wait a minute, this isn’t right. There is more here than we understand.

Which of these scenarios seems more likely: 85% of the matter and 95% of the universe is made up of stuff that we can’t detect, doesn’t interact with anything and doesn’t follow the rules of everything else OR there is something going on that we don’t yet understand?

I don’t know anything about physics at that level. Really just the pop science stuff.

But I know how people work pretty damn well. I will tell you, right now, with 100% certainty: dark matter is modern witch craft. Bunch of nerds got together and convinced themselves of magical forces that can’t be seen, heard, felt, or touched because their models of the universe don’t work without it.

Might be 200 years until we figure it out, but there is an error somewhere and scientists are too proud to admit that they ain’t got a clue. How’d the moon get in the sky? Well I guess someone had to put it up there. How do birds fly? I guess God made them float on account of their lack of sin. Why don’t our models of gravity work? I guess the universe is made up of weird, invisible stuff. Humans don’t like not knowing. So they make wild theories about stuff no one can explain. Someone will come along and figure it out eventually.