Your not wrong exactly. The theories hold up perfectly, they work consistently at many different scales. But at the largest scales, when looking at galaxies, or the universe as a whole, the theories don’t hold up. Or, they would hold up, if the galaxies had more mass in them than we can see… So the simplest explanation is that we’re not actually seeing all the mass that’s there.

That has turned out to be right so far. By that I mean, we have found a whole bunch more matter that was previously unaccounted for. We just haven’t found enough of it yet to fill in all the gaps.

But yeah, we stick with the dark matter idea because it has sort of panned out so far - we have found more stuff.

Sure, probably true. We’ve detected a lot of dark matter actually! Based on a bunch of things, we expect the universe to have more matter than we actually observe. Dark matter just refers to any mass that falls into that category of “previously unobserved”. So as we discover that there are more black holes than we thought, as our telescopes become capable of detecting extremely dim brown dwarves, and as we discover new subatomic particles, we chip away at dark matter, finally shining a light over previously hidden areas of our universe.

But there’s still more unaccounted for.

Well that’s a double edged sword. There’s so much fluctuation in part because it’s such a ubiquitous commodity, availability is high and margins are low.

If branding mattered more (like with groceries) then prices would be more stable (but higher).

But as it is, nobody cares that much what brand of gas they get, it’s just gas. A name brand can’t demand a higher price just because it’s a name brand, nobody cares.

Society would collectively say get your shit together on pricing! And we’d never buy bread again.

I mean, prices at the pump aren’t fluctuating that much, but I do get your meaning. That said, in general people don’t really have much of a choice when it comes to food, we have to eat. I mean, do you remember how eggs surged in price during the pandemic years? People still bought them, it just sucked. Oh we complained about it alright! But we as a society didn’t do anything

This is really freaking cool!

That’s part of the problem, an additional one hour shift exacerbates that issue. Like you end up in the situation where you set the clock back to take advantage of more daylight, but then it’s still dark, so you haven’t achieved anything.

I don’t know, this “solution” is just kicking the can down the road - which isn’t a solution.

No! Obviously no!

A leap hour? You want to let sunset/sunrise drift up to an hour off? You don’t see any problems with that? That’s one of the stupidest things I’ve heard smart people say in a long time.

If adjusting a leap second every couple years is just too damn difficult, then use a leap minute that you need to adjust every hundred years. I promise, it’s a hassle you’ll only have to deal with once in your lifetime.

Though I warm you, there may be unforseen issues with that as well, it might be best to just keep on doing things the way we have been.

The politics and logistics issues holding back lead free avgas are extremely frustrating. I really thought we would have seen that transition by now.

Who knows, maybe it will take electric aircraft to finally put an end to the issue.

Well honestly, I have to admit, I’d never previously considered the amount of lead added to the atmosphere by meteors. But considering it now… only about 6% of meteors are the metallic variety. I had to look up what the average chemical makeup of these is like, but it appears that they’re mostly iron and nickel, with lead making up a small percentage of the remainder, probably less than 1%. So all and all, it doesn’t seem like they actually deposit all that much lead.

Conversely, the connection between the use of leaded gasoline and lead levels in the environment is really very well documented and clear. We know that eliminating it from standard gasoline has made a profound difference. The volume of exhaust from small planes is of course dwarfed by the volume from cars and trucks, so the damage that’s still occurring is significantly less, but it’s still meaningful.

So… I don’t have any solid data for you here, but my intuition is that a handful of meteors probably can’t add close to as much lead to the atmosphere as millions of vehicles burning leaded gas.

Well jet exhaust would be a very large contributor if it were leaded, but luckily it isn’t. It’s just piston powered prop planes that use leaded “avgas”, anything with a turbine uses an unleaded jet fuel.

As it is, it’s pretty bad, but it could be a lot worse. Airborne lead is really quite bad for many aspects of biology. If small planes stopped burning leaded fuel today, I’m quite sure we would be able to track a measurable difference in health and educational outcomes within a decade.

Ok, well at least they put the comma in the right place. But I definitely read that wrong the first time anyway.

"But how could it feed from a brown dwarf that far away?

…

Oh, I see."