So this means that we’re going to have to re-think the Kardashev civilization scale. 95% of the Milky Way can’t even been seen except by inference with our current tools.
There could be a type 3 civilization all around us and we might not even know it. Actually, according to the Kardashev scale, there could be 19 type 3 civilizations – A type 3 uses the ‘average’ power output of a whole galaxy, which is just the 5% we can see….
A couple proposals.
Maybe Einstein was right when he said that everything happened in an instant, and time is just how we perceive that. Maybe that ‘hidden’ 95% is the rest of the history and future of the Milky Way, in time. Since currently we only experience time linearly, we cannot test this preposterous idea with our instruments.
Perhaps string theory is right, and that other 95% are in higher or lower dimensions we can’t see.
Perhaps ‘light’ matter/energy is just like bits of data on a ‘dark’ matter/energy hard drive platter or bits in a quantum computer (qubits). Any data that exists in your computer cannot perceive the computer existing around it, though it could infer that the computer was there (assuming such things are possible, anyway – just stretching for a metaphor).
Tags: nerd with a capital N, wild speculation, wow, yes this is really how I amuse myself