The White Road

The above image shows the Milky Way's galactic center in the night sky over Chile's Paranal Observatory; the laser light points to the exact galactic core. The Milky Way is the galaxy in which we are located; the band of light in the sky we call "the Milky Way" is just the center, the densest concentration of stars, of which our sun is just one of about 300 billion.

There are approximately about 170 billion galaxies in the universe, each with a number of stars comparable to our own.

Between seventy and eighty-five percent of the matter in the universe is a substance scientists call "dark matter," the characteristics and nature of which we do not understand very well at all. Nobody can actually find any dark matter, which makes it hard to study. Its existence is theoretical; a countermove to make up for the fact that the universe mysteriously contains far more mass than it ought to, given the number of observable stars and dust clouds and whatnot. Dark matter is thus a theorized invisible substance with mass, to make up for the numbers, which are drastically off.  80% off, to be exact. Something out there, at any rate, clearly weighs a fuck of a lot.

The above image is a shameless Public Enemy reference. Ahem. Dark Matter, to get even weirder, is thought to be a non-baryonic substance, which is to say, not composed of atoms. Additionally, it apparently has no electrical charge, and doesn't interact electromagnetically with matter. Some scientists theorize that most dark matter is actually extra-small black holes, just popping around through space, ripping tiny little holes through stars and generally not giving a rat's ass whether any of this makes sense to us folks down here on earth.

Are you confused yet? I know I am. Obviously there have been a lot of different people on this planet who've looked up into the brain-curdling vastness of the night sky, elbowed the person next to them, and said "I can tell you what THAT'S all about." Whether you buy it is up to you. Personally, I buy it. Sure, Dark Matter, universe doesn't weigh enough, yeah fine. But it sounds like a bunch of made up nonsense that doesn't jibe in any way with my observable experience of reality. Which makes it mythological. We've come to a point in scientific advancement where, it seems, all the simple, easily observed and provable stuff has already been figured out. But everything new we learn seems to be disassembling, brick by brick, that which we've observed and proven so far.

Just keep in mind Einstein told us that time is not absolute, and that the faster you move through space the slower time moves relative to you. Read that sentence again if you're not completely gobsmacked right now. So, with all that in mind, mythological explanations of reality begin to look less and less absurd every day.

The Maya, for example, called the Milky Way, in a fantastic bit of cross-cultural linguistic coincidence, the "White Road," and considered the Dark Rift, a great dust cloud which obscures numerous stars near the galactic core, to be the "Xibalba Be" or the road to the underworld, through which all souls would pass on their way to meet their fate. 

Anyway, scientific talk of non-atomic matter, microscopic granules of matter that weigh more than the sun, observer-specific reality, and time moving relative to the velocity of the observer has the effect of pushing the limits of even a receptive mind to skepticism. Not skepticism of science, mind you. I'm willing to believe that 80% of the universe is made of a substance that can't be measured, located, or determined to exist in any concrete way. Sure, reality is weird. I can accept that. But why, exactly, again, is it irrational to believe that after death each human soul must face the nightmarish tests of the houses of Xibalba? Or any other belief, for that matter? When the latest scientific research sounds like magical realist fiction, surely we're due for a revival of some very old time religion, as in paleolithic-era magical technologies. It's only a matter of time.