The “dark universe” — the sum of Dark Matter and Dark Energy — is pretty much THE universe. Observations put the dark universe at about 95 percent of the total. That means our kind of matter and energy — the stuff you see, touch and experience every day — is a mere 1/20th of the cosmos.

If this were an election, we would have no say in the congress of creation. Remember that next time you see an image of a beautiful spiral galaxy. What you see is not the galaxy at all. what you see is some luminous chaff floating at the center of a vast, dark ocean. So it is not that the universe is big and we are small that robs us of significance. We are barely part of the universe at all. That is why we don’t matter.

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