If humanity had worked out instead of being this failed startup of God's — it's a common mistake among neophyte entrepreneurs to create a product in their own image and likeness, without paying attention to market needs — instead of debating the rise of a candidate who skims public funds and the decline of a Supreme Court that's rotten to the core, we'd be going crazy talking about a 7-ton machine that, 150 meters underground in an abandoned mine in South Dakota, went "ping!" That "ping!", my friends, may be the first detection of so-called dark matter.
If humanity had worked out instead of being this narcissistic debacle of God's — it's a common mistake among narcissists to shine all the spotlights on themselves and then suffer over the quality of what's being illuminated — instead of a column titled "Doubts about penis size: what's myth and what isn't?" sitting on Folha's homepage all Friday afternoon, we'd have "Doubts about dark matter: understand what we know about one of the universe's main ingredients."
"One of the main ingredients," bewildered reader, is no exaggeration. Somewhere between 80% and 95% of everything that exists is made of stuff we know almost nothing about: dark matter and dark energy. The atoms that make up you, me, the Last Supper on the neighbor's wall, Saturn, hyaluronic acid, the British Crown Jewels, the crunch of a Kit Kat bar — in short, all visible matter — accounts for less than 20% of the flour in the cosmic cake.
Astronomers discovered (or rather, intuited) dark matter in the 1930s. According to the laws of physics, if there were not an enormous gravitational force — greater than that of detectable celestial bodies — the stars in galaxies, rather than holding together, would go spinning off every which way. I won't venture to explain more than that, as I confess I understand about as much about dark (and energy) matter as I do about xenon gas.
Xenon gas is the element contained in the 7-ton machine buried at the bottom of the mine in South Dakota. It is a giant target waiting for the dark matter arrows that physicists say are flying this way and that, back and forth, all the time. (There may be a little dark matter passing through your ear and out your little toe right now.)
For reasons unknown to me, when one of these stray micro-arrows strikes not your eardrum but the great bath of xenon, it goes "ping!" and scientists drop everything to answer the question: but could this be the (elusive) real thing?
Well, earlier this month, the scientists responsible for the experiment came forward to say that a "ping!" analyzed since 2023 has a good chance of being a genuine, official dark matter "ping!" and not, I don't know, a crossed intergalactic line or the sneeze of an intern who forgot to cover their nose.
Come to think of it, if humanity had worked out instead of being this pathetic mess, we wouldn't even need the xenon "ping!" to stop thinking about Flavios, Daniels, Andrés, Alexandres, or, worse, Donalds, Elons, and Sams. We'd simply need to look at our hand, and think that each atom in it — like each atom in the rest of our body, in Saturn, in the British Crown Jewels, and so on and so forth — was created billions of years ago, inside stars. A "ping!" would sound inside our heads and we'd go for a swim in the sea, dance the YMCA, or eat dulce de leche: a few of the truly important things to do in this (not that there's another) life.
