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This "Big News Coming Soon" is going to be very interesting on it own merits.  At the least, this is an interesting video and I have learned a bit from embedding the new video player it plays within.

My purpose in placing this video here is to stimulate a discussion about what goals and uses would be pursued as a consequence of a scientific find like "Dark Matter".

Would World Peace be pursued first and foremost, with the goal of serving all of humanity in the name of the Common Good?  Would the science be pursued with the idea of providing free and clean energy for our planetary home, or example?

Would Weaponization prove to be the first and foremost pursuit,   Would the science be pursued with the idea of subjugating Enemies of the State?  Would we see a replay of the first use of the fruit of the discovery of "Nuclear Fussion", the terrorist attacks on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?  Would an Arms Race result as the Corporate Captains of Capitalism sought maximize profits in the Military Industrial Complex Sector?

The following link is to the article from space.com from which I extracted the video.  If you would like to comment in the discussion I am encouraging, follow the second link to our #OBGA discussion forum on this subject.

<a title="Has Dark Matter Finally Been Found? Big News Coming Soon" href="http://www.space.com/19845-dark-matter-found-nasa-experiment.html" target="_blank">http://www.space.com/19845-dark-matter-found-nasa-experiment.html</a>

"Would World Peace be pursued first and foremost, with the goal of serving all of humanity in the name of the Common Good?"

Well, first of all, this society is not organized to pursue world peace or the common good.

"Would the science be pursued with the idea of providing free and clean energy for our planetary home, or example?"

What practical applications for dark matter there might be, if any, aren't even known at this time. It's a form of matter which does not interact with normal matter either on an electroweak or strong force level -- only gravitation. It only has observable effects on an interstellar scale. If there are any applications we wouldn't be able to exploit them for decades, if not centuries.

And this may not even be an exploitable discovery. I mean, theoretically and experimentally it was a huge breakthrough to detect the neutrino, and it has been immensely valuable and neutrino astronomy is now providing us with hitherto unknown insights into the life and death of stars -- but the damn things are useless here on Earth, considering that they barely interact with normal matter in the first place. You need giant tanks of water kept in utter darkness buried under a hundred feet of rock just to get an environment dark enough and quiet enough to catch the single _photon_ from when a neutrino bumps into a water molecule every other day.

So just because dark matter may have been observed doesn't mean we're on the cusp of new technological breakthroughs such as Einsteinian relativity ushered in with e=mc^2 and quantum physics. Those completely revolutionized our concepts of space, time, matter, and energy in ways which had never before been envisioned in human history. Dark matter, on the other hand, has been theorized and speculated about for decades and is basically known to exist. There is too much indirect evidence to discount it at this point, even if no direct evidence has been found before now. So I doubt the practical impacts of this will be all that world-shattering.

Wow, thanks for the comment Ian - maybe this will not be something we can use right away in our struggle for justice. But nice to know I guess. My brain is pretty active these days with just the stuff in front of me. I'm going to wait a while on the dark matter issue!