Back in the day as we oldsters apparently say, things were different. It used to be that old forgetful fart would be relying on his memory to assert that "back in the day...." everything was cheaper, doctors gave a shit, things lasted longer and were made in America by union workers.
Interestingly enough, you might notice that all that stuff is true. Things change. Hell, even I change! For instance, I have lost a lot of weight on purpose and by plan, so I am packing less lard. Furthermore, we garden a lot more area now even though both myself and my sweety-pie are finding it hard to bend, kneel or otherwise move like you must in order to work a garden. This must mean I am alive, since as we all know, life changes things, things which change are alive, even if we don't understand how. Mountain ranges change over time, in fact they might have been an ocean floor at some point in the past/future, and being alive, they have changed over time. Changing life over time is evolution and all things evolve which are changing/alive. Nothing stays the same, because Nothing is a One Part quality. Nothing is all that it is.
Our perceptions of the Universe are changing over time as our sense improve. In the same way a baby is half blind at birth, having not needed vision in the womb, as this sense changes over time they are able to perceive a different Universe. Now that we have so many high resolution cameras in orbit, and super powerful computers to process the feed, we are seeing the old Universe in such a new way it has created a New Universe.
We saw before by visible light, photons hitting our retinas and activating chemical changes in our neural net. When a camera sees in much higher or lower frequencies than the human eye can see, objects and conditions appear which change our understanding of "empty" space.
First of all, we got here by basic Newtonian physics. The way things spin is controlled by the simple physics most of us learned in high school. Gravity, ramps, levers, etc. all work well at low speeds and frequencies. Take those cameras in space: they spin around the planet at speeds relative to their altitudes. When you have thousands of satellites flying around the earth at many different heights you need to know where each one is going to be at any one time, and Newton's Laws and equations always do that for us. The trouble began at different speeds and sizes. When you look at things going at the speed of light or so they no longer quite match those predictions based on Newton, and when great masses are involved, like galaxies, light is noticeably bent into a focus, causing very odd artifacts in the eyes of those cameras. What you see is no longer what you get, should you be able to go there and get anything.
Well, when you examine the things orbiting the entire Universe, i.e. the galaxies, it seems the equations don't match the data. Actually, when you examine the problem you can see that some of the "facts" are actually assumptions, like the mass of the known Universe. That changes the gravitational pull on those galaxies and that changes their speed relative to their orbits.
So, they looked in long wavelengths for those dark Things which were adding so much mass but not radiating in the visible light spectrum. They did not see anything. Then they checked the math and the data and what they realized was they did in fact see what it was, but their perception was spoiled by certain assumptions.
Consider what a bacteria sees when it looks out upon your lower intestinal tract. Chances are, we believe, the bacteria does not see a great ape descendant, or a higher being, but more like a landscape, spread out and mindless before it, waiting to be developed by tens of thousands of similar bacteria. We, of course, assume the bacteria within do nothing of the sort because that would be too scary to admit.
We looked out at the Universe and assumed our perfect human eyes saw all there was to see, and our perfect human minds could figure out what exactly it was we did see. Things change.
95% of the Universe is "Black Matter"... stuff that pervades everything you see but is so monstrously huge that it literally staggers the imagination and you must see it as lifeless. This assumption is not backed by any data. 5% of the Universe is matter like you and Mars, stuff that works by either Newtonian or Quantum physics rules and laws. 5% is Black Energy, stuff which does what energy does but does it in a form and frequency that we just can't perceive it except with complex math, split out among many Big Computers.
Now, with the introduction of the concept we can modify our math used to process images and "see" where the dark matter is relative to the "light" matter which we can see with our own eyes and it is like clouds in our coffee, to be expected because the Universe doesn't like the sort of "order" our brains love to impose on things which have no inherent order, like spots on a piece of paper, or stars in the night sky.
Now that we see and perceive the Universe more properly and it now has a math to fit the data, we can begin to work with reality, maybe new realities to go along with the new understanding of how things move the way they do up there. As we do, perhaps we can also reconsider the idea that the Thinking Thing is looking up at the Nonthinking Thing. Perhaps it is the other way around, perhaps a bit of each. Thus we are looking up at a consciousness so great and made up of energies we have just begun to notice, that it may think of us as less interesting than a benign bacteria in the cosmic gut, undoubtedly incapable of thought/consciousness. It's okay, perhaps it is just as well we are not very noticeable.
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