A thought crossed my mind yesterday as I was wading through, and deleting, all the spam that arrives with monotonous regularity in the Lunchista email account. The emails' titles are displayed 20 to a page, and every now and then all 20 are spam! I'd find this astonishing, had I not read in New Scientist ages ago that 90% of all email messages sent, are spam. Yes, 90%!
And so, continuing our astronomical theme for a moment, it occured to me that this is almost exactly the same proportion as the amount, by mass, of Dark Matter in the known universe. Matter which cannot be seen, and whose exact composition is as yet unknown, but without whose additional mass galaxies would spiral to bits, and the universe itself would expand much more rapidly than is, apparently, the case. I have tried to draw it but failed dismally on account of not being able to see it, so an idea of its shape, pinched from the Virgo Consortium at the Max Planck Institut, is shown at the top of this post.
Is it possible that the similarity of these two proportion figures is no coincidence, and that the spam we see is in fact part of some all-pervasive burden of additional mass, and hence work, from which the entire universe suffers? Is it, like the 2.7 Kelvin background radiation discovered at Bell Labs (now sadly demised) in 1965 and initially mistaken for pigeon-muck on their receiver dish, some remnant from the Big Bang that we are dealing with? Could it be that 90% of the original "cosmic egg" was in fact composed of offshore pharmacies, purveyors of dodgy submarine watches and even dodgier university degrees, and promises of physical enhancement unmentionable on a family site, all enlivened by the odd Nigerian warlord's daughter wishing to reclaim her inheritance via your personal bank details?
If this is the case, what is to be done?
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