If hydrogen wasn't the lightest element?

[Christopher]

Darkwing wrote:

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Poul Anderson says in one of the Flandry novels that there are a huge number of rogue planets (planets not in a star system). That'd account for some of the missing matter.

Well, Anderson may have made a lucky guess, but at the time he had no was of knowing that, so it doesn't make much sense to cite that as your evidence for the idea.

However, there's no way that would be enough to account for the majority of the missing mass. If it were baryonic matter, there'd be a lot more light extinction from all the clutter in between the stars.

As for making the replicators not work, they're what the Reeves'Stevens' called transtator tech - based on subspace effects, like the shields, warp drive, transporter, etc.

The term "transtator" was introduced, and established as "the basis for every important piece of equipment that we have" (in Spock's words), in the TOS episode "A Piece of the Action" by David P. Harmon and Gene L. Coon.

[Darkwing]

Christopher wrote:

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Well, Anderson may have made a lucky guess, but at the time he had no was of knowing that, so it doesn't make much sense to cite that as your evidence for the idea.

Excuse me? Did I say it was evidence? I credited the source where I read the idea. If I were a scientist, I'd need evidence. This wasn't a theory, just an idea that, given some research, could plausibly become the basis of one.

[/QUOTE]However, there's no way that would be enough to account for the majority of the missing mass. If it were baryonic matter, there'd be a lot more light extinction from all the clutter in between the stars.[/QUOTE] Didn't say it was, just that it potentially explains some of it.

The term "transtator" was introduced, and established as "the basis for every important piece of equipment that we have" (in Spock's words), in the TOS episode "A Piece of the Action" by David P. Harmon and Gene L. Coon.

Yeah, I couldn't remember for certain if there was a reference on the show, but did remember the Reeves'Stevens' use of it. Still, if there's some change in physics that throws the replicators off, it'll throw off anything using transtators, IMO.

[Crazy Eddie]

Christopher wrote:

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However, there's no way that would be enough to account for the majority of the missing mass. If it were baryonic matter, there'd be a lot more light extinction from all the clutter in between the stars.

That's not even true for planets ORBITING stars, why would you expect it to be true of large cold planets in interstellar space?

Excitation is detectable for some types of matter in a diffuse state -- atomic hydrogen, for example -- which can be detected as it receives and then sheds an electron/photon from nearby energy sources. Excitation in a planetary atmosphere is harder to detect since 1) the planet itself re-absorbs alot of that energy and 2) it is a relatively small amount of energy being emitted from a VERY small point in distant space, below the resolution of most telescopes.

Not neccesarily brown dwarfs, but jupiter or saturn-mass rogue planets wandering the galaxy is likely to be a fairly common situation, and some of those may be double or tripple planet formations orbiting each other. This would, of course, imply that most of the time a collapsing cloud of gas and dust would not achieve anywhere near enough density or temperature to actually fuse elements; even below brown dwarfs, there would be whole solar systems that form around a couple of large gas giants with no star to speak of. It's even possible that these cases are the vast majority of planetary systems in the galaxy and that they remain undetected only because our equipment for measuring gravitational lensing isn't precise enough to detect them.

[publiusr]

newtype_alpha wrote:

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Excitation is detectable for some types of matter in a diffuse state -- atomic hydrogen, for example.

Then too, there is this:

Negative temperature may also have implications for cosmology. Dark energy, thought to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe, exerts negative pressure, which suggests it might have negative temperature – Schneider is currently discussing the idea with cosmologists.


http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/01/neg...ature-for.html

[Crazy Eddie]

^ Dark matter is at least a placeholder for an undetected datapoint that could be anything from non-baryonic matter to a really poor understanding of how gravity really works.

Dark energy is a cosmological ass-pull intended to rescue a theory that has entirely ceased to make sense.