“Orb of Dark Energy”. Artist: Derek Shunia
Aug 19, 2013
Cosmologists still have no idea what dark energy is.
In 1998, two astronomical research teams independently discovered what is now called “dark energy.” Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Brian Schmidt from the Australian National University projects each led the two teams who discovered that the Hubble Constant, a uniform expansion rate imparted to the Universe from the Big Bang explosion, was accelerating.
Certain concepts, like redshift and gravity, are fundamental to the Big Bang hypothesis. According to theory, light shifts toward the red end of the spectrum because an object is moving away. Because objects interpreted to be at great distances move away faster than objects nearer to Earth, the Universe is expanding. The usual understanding is that galaxies are all moving away from each other because the Universe is growing larger.
Another important principle is that the Universe is gravity-driven. If gravity is the only controlling force, then the expansion set in motion by the Big Bang must be slowing down—an inescapable conclusion based on gravitational attraction.
However, Perlmutter and Schmidt realized from the study of Type 1a supernovae that the expansion of the Universe was not slowing down, instead it was accelerating. When the astronomers plotted redshifted “velocities of recession,” the figures suggested that the expansion rate of the Universe is greater today than in its early days.
In order to analyze the influx of computer data from telescopes around the world and out in space, the GRavitational lEnsing Accuracy Testing 2008 (GREAT08) PASCAL Challenge, a group of 38 scientists from 19 international institutions, was gathered in hopes of solving so-called “dark acceleration” in the Hubble Constant by April 30, 2009.
The computational requirements were distributed across a wide assortment of disciplines—some not necessarily in the astronomical realm. By making use of distributed processing, astronomers can unburden their own computer resources and use any number of voluntary subscribers for assistance.
Was all this effort even necessary? Even some NASA scientists are questioning the existence of dark energy. What is the more likely explanation for the supernovae anomalies that led to the dark energy theory? Cosmologists made their first mistake when they ignored electricity as a significant force in the cosmos. For example, Supernova 1987a, the closest supernova to Earth ever studied, exhibits unmistakable signs of electrical discharge.
Size, color, and luminosity reveal nothing about a star’s age. A red giant star is big because there is low electrical stress in the star’s connected circuit. A blue-white star, on the other hand, is under extreme electrical stress—so much so that it could explode due to a breakdown in its double-layer envelope or due to electrical fissioning. No assumption about a star’s age can help when trying to determine if it will explode. In fact, one aspect of high-energy plasma discharges is that they can produce redshifts that have no connection to recessional velocity.
The Supernova Legacy Survey discovered that the brighter supernovae were more common in the past and that they were about 12% brighter 8 billion years ago than they are now. No one knows why the early Universe had more of the Type 1a supernovae. One observation does show a compelling clue: the brighter starbursts are found more often where there is a high rate of star formation.
As the Electric Universe postulates, more stars are born where there are greater flows of electric charge. That current could also initiate a greater number of stellar explosions with anomalous luminosities and high redshifts. That would make highly charged, nearby objects undergoing electrical discharges look like remote, high redshift supernovae that are too bright for their distances. One can imagine the theoretical problems that would result from that misinterpretation.
Stephen Smith
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The Noömass Hypothesis: Is Dark Matter Made of Knowledge?
. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. (Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”)
I’ve argued previously that the idea of expanding spheres of colonization—ships full of families settling on new planets, having more families, etc.—fails to reflect our own destiny as immortal creatures and thus may be an unlikely agenda for extraterrestrial civilizations either. Yet if we confine interstellar “expansion” to the expansion of the noösphere, the enlargement of knowledge of the cosmos, then a more realistic picture emerges, one that conforms not at all badly to the long history of human interaction with seemingly nonhuman technology (leaving aside humanoid visitors—I’m referring mainly to orbs, spheres, and other technologies that don’t seem like they have little pilots inside).
Mathematical models (such as presented in a recent article by two mathematicians in Scotland, Arwen Nicholson and Duncan Forgan) dictate that the earth should long ago have been visited by extraterrestrial Von Neumann probes. As I suggested in a post on such probes, it seems reasonable to assume that since long before there were people and even long before there was life here, this planet has played host to automated surveillance technology, roving science platforms, probably having multiple origins but “living” right here. And we’d be unexceptional—just one of billions of worlds similarly swarming with intelligent surveillance machines taking various forms.
Needless to say, such a knowledge-gathering project undertaken for billions of years by numerous separate ET intelligence's would produce, over the aeons, more than mere mountains of data. There would need to be some material or energetic substrate or “server” to support this knowledge. What if the invisible “dark matter” that is needed to make our current cosmological models consistent consists partly or even entirely of noömass, matter/energy that has been metabolized into information and that advanced intelligence's have perhaps sequestered into the very folds of spacetime?
Borges imagined a map as big as the country it represented; perhaps there are already many maps nearly as big and as detailed as the rest of the (dwindling) universe. It may not be only a known universe but a multiply known universe—known and re-known many many times over, in such detail that it can be inhabited and manipulated and remade for countless alien experiences, countless knowers ancient and immortal, some of whom arose long before our planet even formed. Their ubiquitous drone science platforms scour and record “all that is knowable” and, ultimately, may assimilate the rest of the universe (what is left, what we still see with our telescopes).
The Russian
Cosmist
“V’ger” in the first (and I think way underrated) Star Trek movie was an ancient, autistic machine intelligence scouring the galaxy to “know all that is knowable,” assimilating everything into a vast, hyper-detailed representation. I wonder: Could just a few thousand or a few million V’gers across the universe, all with the same idea, end up devouring the whole thing, metabolizing the unknown into the known?
The “known universe,” in other words, could be just that, literally: known, and in far greater detail, by someone else, or lots of someone elses. What’s missing from what we see—all that “dark matter”—could be precisely their knowledge of what we see, which includes their knowledge of us.
Perhaps we should give up looking for radio signals and dim Dyson Spheres (imagining advanced extraterrestrials to still be biologically based “civilizations” huddled around their stellar campfires) and start looking for pure information, something like the Akashic Record, more massive than the visible universe, enfolded in the fabric of spacetime itself.
