Dark Matter Matters
Just because it's not seen or acknowledged doesn't mean it's not critically important.
The video I posted yesterday about the known universe is incredible for a couple of reasons. The first reason I pointed out yesterday, and that is the unfathomable expansiveness of what can be observed by contemporary astronomical tools. The farthest observable galaxies are 13.5 billion light years away, a mind-boggling expanse that throws shade on the importance and cosmic centrality of earthly problems. The other reason relates to what cannot be observed in the universe, i.e. the space in between planets, stars, and galaxies, which is referred to as dark energy and dark matter. Describing dark energy and matter, NASA says:
More is unknown than is known. We know how much dark energy there is because we know how it affects the universe's expansion. Other than that, it is a complete mystery. But it is an important mystery. It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest —everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter —adds up to less than 5% of the universe.
So the vast majority of the universe is unknown, unseeable, unmeasurable…but somehow there and exerting impacts on the visible, knowable stuff.
These unknowns don’t begin and end in deep space.
Most humans conduct their lives based on material relations existing in the four dimensions of length, width, volume, and time. In this Newtonian mechanistic world, matter is real and does predictable stuff based on the interrelation of mass, velocity, inertia, etc. But this predictability breaks down on the quantum level, which (theoretically) has 11 dimensions; all but the aforementioned four are imperceptible and only understood through their impacts. On the quantum level, proving the existence of matter —the stuff we can observe and measure —is impossible. The best physicists can do to prove anything exists is give probabilities of their existence. For example, it’s highly probable this chair will be stable enough to support my ass, but there’s no way to prove it absolutely.
At the risk of waxing too metaphysically, phenomena like synchronicities may be explainable through quantum mechanical dynamics, even though our understanding of those dynamics, at least for now, preclude such an explanation. Metaphysics aside, it’s fair to say that many of the forces shaping reality are unseen and unknowable, but they are there and actively impacting the visible world. Don’t believe me? Try pointing to the oxygen that keeps you alive or the electricity that powers your stuff.
Before its leaders were busted for lining their friends’ pockets and making sketchy real estate deals, Black Lives Matter (BLM) was all the rage. I understand why. From a sociopolitical perspective, the lives of black people don’t matter, or at least not nearly as much as white ones. In the U.S. and elsewhere, black people are statistically poorer, unhealthier, and more likely to be targets of police harassment and incarceration; these things are holding true long after the abolition of slavery and Jim Crow.
But something always felt off about BLM to me. Perhaps it was the black boxes people put in their social media profiles to show their BLM solidarity. There are few better ways of saying someone doesn’t matter than treating that person as indistinct and uniform. I thought putting a picture of an actual black person who matters to you would be a more fitting, personal show of solidarity to black people than a generic black box. I’d probably feature one of my black friends or Stevie Wonder.
A few years ago, I was at a restaurant where I noticed all the workers were black and brown and all the patrons, like me, were white —a very common scenario. At that restaurant, I came up with a phrase to replace BLM. “Dark Matter Matters” alloyed concepts about astrophysics and racial equality. Just like the universe is largely comprised of, and held together by, unseen, dark forces, the world is largely comprised of, and held together by, unseen, dark people —the Guatemalan dishwasher in the restaurant kitchen, the black janitor cleaning the school’s hallways, the Indian seamstress making our clothes, the Congolese miner extracting lithium for our electronics’ batteries, and so forth. The labor of these unseen people make the modern world possible, yet their lives barely matter to their visible, affluent, generally-light-skinned beneficiaries.
And to my mind, relative darkness has a greater impact on who matters than blackness —the latter term connoting an absolute, but nonexistent, physical quality. Within virtually every society, darkness is viewed as less desirable than lightness. Within black populations, dark skinned people tend to be considered less attractive and capable than light skinned ones. Dark skinned white people tend to be seen as more nefarious and less trustworthy than light skinned ones. And so forth.
Due to its organizational corruption, BLM fell somewhat out of favor as a cause to rally behind in the last couple years. Unfortunately, BLM’s fall wasn’t a prelude for more nuanced conversations or an action plan for bringing about racial equality. The COVID-inspired lockdown and consequent economic fallout disproportionately harmed black populations. And as smart as my would-be #darkmattermatters movement is, hashtags are not movements or signifiers of real understanding —those things come about through earnest observation, inquiry, relatedness, and appreciation for the forces—and beings—that hold our universe together.
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