Neil's News

MACHOs vs. WIMPs

4 May 2002

[Apologies in advance for all the footnotes.]

It is well-known that about 90% of the matter in the Universe is unaccounted for^[?]. Cosmologists are split between the MACHOs^[?] (MAssive Compact Halo Objects) who believe that a few black holes and other monsters make up the missing mass, and the WIMPs^[?] (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), like my uncle at SNO^[?], who believe that neutrinos have mass.

In an apparently unrelated topic, Freeman Dyson famously suggested the creation of hollow artificial worlds^[?] that completely enclose their parent suns, thus allowing a power-hungry civilisation to capture all of their sun's light. He went on to postulate that since the sky is full of stars, there are obviously not a large number of these spheres in existence. However, he said this in the 60's, before the mystery of missing matter was discovered.

Cross-linking the two topics raises the obvious question of how much of the dark matter in the Universe is dark because it is hidden behind Dyson Spheres. For all we know, 90% of stars have been wrapped up, disassembled, or otherwise mangled for purposes of Megascale Engineering^[?]. Thus I'd like to submit a third option to the MACHO vs WIMP debate: the WEIRDO (Wacky Extraterrestrial Intelligence Research & Development Operations). WEIRDOs believe that all the nice stable stars have been used up, leaving just the OBAFGKM^[?] rejects (like our Sun).

"Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true." -- Niels Bohr.

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