Dark Energy Tied to Human Origins

[dArKeR]

By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer, SPACE.com

Among the most elusive and important questions in science are whether we're alone and what the heck that strange stuff is that's pushing the universe apart. Neither is likely to be answered anytime soon, yet each occupies many great minds and together they drive billions of dollars in research spending every year.

Now wouldn't it be really weird if these two seemingly unrelated questions were intimately linked? Strange but possibly true, says Mario Livio, a theorist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI).

Astronomers have known since the 1920s that the universe is expanding. In 1998 they were astounded to learn that it is expanding at an ever-increasing pace. The universe is accelerating, in other words.

Nobody has a clue what's up, so smart minds invoke a thing dubbed dark energy to explain why gravity appears to have turned into a repulsive force. They say this dark energy makes up 73 to 75 percent of the mass-energy budget of the cosmos.

"It's the equivalent of us not knowing what water is," as Livio puts it, "even though it covers 70 percent of the Earth."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=96&ncid=96&e=1&u=/space/20040531/sc_space/darkenergytiedtohumanorigins

[truthspeaker]

1. Totally misleading title

Nowhere in the article is dark energy tied to human origins. F*&$ing science reporting.