FUZZY DARK ENERGY AND POLITICS

People shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks… Isaiah 2:3-4 

I think by now the media’s unending focus on everything related to the upcoming activities transpiring on Nov. 5, 2024 would be satiated, at least outside the DC beltway. It’s apparently not. The media is only shifting out of first gear now that Iowans have finished their caucuses’ dances.

A meager 15% of Iowa’s Repubs managed to brave sub-zero temperatures and celebrate being caucus-goers last week. With no surprise whatsoever, Donald Trump was the caucuses’ winner. Naturally, The Donald is now beating his Iowa plowshares into political swords.

A timeworn plow, likely older than The Donald’s 77 years.  

This time around the Dems wisely abandoned caucusing for their presidential candidate after being gravely wounded by their grand mal caucus fiasco in 2020. It took 3 days for them to figure out that Pete Buttigieg barely beat Bernie Sanders. Congrats Pete that victory got you the Transportation Secretary’s job. In 2024, Iowa Dems instead are casting regular mail-in ballots from Jan. 12 through Mar. 5 (aka, Super Tuesday) to vote for their presidential candidate. Ho hum.  

But let’s not get too grounded in the Hawkeye state’s momentary quadrennial political glow. Instead, look above and beyond. There’s fascinating news about the heavens that has a connective thread to the presidential election. Dennis Overbye wrote an intriguing story about how our universe may have begun, way, way beyond Des Moines, Concord and even Washington, DC. Dennis is the New York Times’ “cosmic affairs correspondent.” I wonder what Dennis’ cosmic affairs beat does not include because ultimately there’s very little outside the realm of cosmic affairs, not even Cleopatra and Mark Antony, Richard and Liz or Taylor and Travis.  

Dennis’ story, “The Early Universe Was Bananas,” discusses results from a new astrophysical assessment about the birth of our universe. This investigation focuses on the astronomically short interlude of just half a billion years after the Big Bang, when time itself began. Mercifully, this birth was free from any medical interventions.

The study focuses on examining “newborn” galaxies in the firmament. Until now, standard cosmological theory has assumed that the newest galaxies would appear very similar to the prevailing inventory of about 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. Unexpectedly, after scrutinizing thousands of baby galaxies they appeared not at all like orbs or discs associated with older galaxies like our Milky Way. The newborn galaxies instead look more like bananas, pickles or surfboards shown in the image below. If confirmed, this surprising result may expand our sense of how dark energy-matter influences the universe.

 A baby banana galaxy.

 A fair amount of modern cosmological deliberation about the birth and life of our universe entails considering completely-invisible dark energy. Dark energy and its closely-related dark matter are estimated to constitute 95% of our universe’s total energy-mass content. Thus for thousands of years as we humans have gazed up into starry night skies what we’re seeing represents only 5% of the universe. This pervasive dark energy-matter is postulated to account for the universe’s gravitational forces that influence everything everywhere.

 Having been hypothesized for more than 30 years, dark energy-matter now comes in several flavors. Cosmologists have enlarged their views about how dark energy-matter may work and gained fresh insights about new galaxies. Currently, an entire dark-sector gallery of imperceptible particles has been hypothesized, including fuzzy dark energy.

After learning about this shadowy astrophysical realm, I connected these universal dark forces with our current political expanse. It’s quite clear to me that The Donald embodies fuzzy dark energy through and through. Unfortunately, the untruthful Trumpian fuzzy dark energy is having quite visible consequences. His political and campaign forces are certainly dark, too often very fuzzy and have very little to do with gravity. That hasn’t bothered his followers at all.

Baby banana galaxies portray challengers like Nicki Haley and up until Sunday, Ron DeSantis (who’s retreated to the Everglades), whose hoped-for goal is somehow to be the Republican candidate for president. Baby pickle galaxies depict Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson, the virtually invisible Democratic presidential challengers. Galactically-speaking, President Joe Biden is represented by Mayall’s Object, an adult galaxy discovered 82 years ago at the Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton, east of San Jose, CA. It’s my local space observatory. Joe will be 82 years old 15 days after he wins the election, having conquered fuzzy dark energy spewed by the Repubs. Here’s hoping.

 

DARK ENERGY, FAR AND NEAR

The past and the future are fiction; they only exist in the imaginations of the present. ~ Archibald Wheeler  

People consider many distinct time periods during their lives. Many persons focus on what’s going to happen to them during the next day or next week. Some young folks wonder how they’ll survive their teenage lives. California truckers pay attention to the next 12 hours, the maximum duty period many of them can drive during any single time interval between rest stops. Unsurprisingly, elected federal politicians focus on the next 2, 4 or 6 years depending on what political office they want to retain. I hope at least a few of them, especially the president and Rep. McCarthy, are also now concentrating on the time between now and June 1st to avoid a national debt default.

Economists distinguish different analytical time periods as either short run or long run. The economic short run is a time period where at least one productive input is fixed or unchangeable. Classic productive inputs are land, labor and capital. More recently, entrepreneurship has been added. The long run is a time period where all productive inputs can vary; for example, rental rates (the price of land) and wage rates (the price of labor) can change. Notice that economists often do not usually state how much actual clock time the short run or long run is. That degree of specificity apparently depends on case-study specifics. I believe the range of a short run period is from 3 months to a full year. The long run heads off from there into multi-year eras.

Almost a century ago, archeologists devised a means of classifying ancient societies called the three-age system. This system, beginning with the oldest period called the Stone Age, measures human development. The Stone Age lasted more than 3 million years ending between 4000 BCE and 2000 BCE, with the advent of metalworking. The Bronze Age lasted through 1200 BCE. The last and most recent period was the Iron Age, when the production of iron and then steel was mastered. The Iron Age ended during the 5th century BCE, after written records like Samarian tablets were first produced by human accountants and royal writers.

Cosmologists, like the late Professor Wheeler, quoted above and who popularized the concept of black holes, have adopted an entirely different, truly expansive time perspective. Astrophysicists have no professional trepidations about next month’s consumer price index or an up-coming prophesized recession. Their long run heads not just for a decade or even a century. No, cosmologists’ attention squarely aimed at the firmament could span 100 billion (10^10) earth years.

This very looong run period – give or take a few billions years – is cosmologists’ current guestimate for when the entire universe will end. No personal worries for any of us or our grandkids’ grandkids. But if you’re the worrying sort, cosmologists also expect our dear sun – currently a yellow dwarf star – will flame out in a mere 5 billion years. Oh, my.

Cosmologists concern themselves with the life cycle of stars and galaxies that comprise our universe. The picture below illustrates fragments of Cassiopeia A, a massive red supergiant star that met its fate when it became a supernova. The light from this star’s detonation probably reached the Earth in the early 1680s, about 80 years after the telescope was invented. Perhaps Edmond Halley, a pioneering astronomer during that time, saw Cassiopeia A explode through his eye piece. Halley’s fame rests with his comet, whose periodicity he accurately computed to be 75-76 years. Halley’s comet will next be seen here on Earth in 2062, perhaps by our kids and grandkids.  

Remnants of Cassiopeia A

Source: NASA, ESA, CSA via the New York Times

 

It was a mere 13.8 billion years ago that our current universe was created in some sort of singularly impressive, fiery burst of energy. It has been growing ever since. Astrophysicists have debated for decades if our universe will continue to expand forever or collapse in some sort of gigantic contraction. In fact, 25 years ago astronomers realized that the cosmic enlargement was not contracting but speeding up, attributed to a supremely strange force called dark energy.

If the universe’s dark energy continues to reign unabated, distant galaxies will be speeding away ever-faster from our miniscule neighborhood in the Milky Way. Which means eventually we won’t be able to see them anymore. As the celestial clock continues to tick, the less we’ll know about our universe. That represents a worrying prospect for cosmologists, given their very elongated analytical time period.

But dark energy isn’t just a celestial force influencing the heavens. I’d posit that we Americans also are once again suffering from a dark energy force in Washington, DC. I’m referring to the Republicans’ efforts to use our nation’s artificially-imposed federal debt ceiling (created in 1917 and legislatively modified in 1939) to now forcibly implement their own detrimental policies. Our debt ceiling concerns the fiscal requirements associated with paying for already-implemented legislation, not future legislation.

The US debt ceiling has been raised or revised 78 times since 1960, including 49 times under Repub presidents and 29 times under Dem presidents. The debt ceiling was increased 3 times with trifling trauma under President Trump without any associated conditions. Each of these 78 rounds of debt ceiling revisions has involved considerable political posturing and much media attention. Each time the same issues are raised but never resolved; they’re simply pushed off for the next round to deal with once again.

Last week, the president wisely retreated from his pointless no negotiation stance. The initial “negotiations” began at the White House, with President Biden and congressional leaders including Rep. McCarthy and Sen. Schumer. Each side regurgitated their already-known positions. Dems want a clean debt ceiling increase passed by Congress – meaning debt enlargement with no spending cuts. The Repubs offered a temporary $1.5 trillion (T) debt increase only if the Biden Administration agrees to remove sizeable existing renewable energy tax credits, add more work requirements for food stamp and government aid recipients and stop the president’s student debt-forgiveness plans. Predictably, neither side gave a proverbial fiscal inch to the other.

The best debt ceiling resolution would be to annul the Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917 that authorized Congress to establish an aggregate ceiling on the total amount of new bonds – Liberty Bonds – that the government could issue (for World War I expenditures). Neither Repubs nor Dems want such an annulment to happen because it would significantly diminish congressional budgetary authority. I expect the ultimate resolution for this round of debt ceiling negotiations, like others before it, will be another unclean agreement that includes budget cuts that aren’t as large as Repubs want, but are greater than what Dems want, tied to a substantial increase in the debt limit. Dems and Repubs are no doubt now discussing such terms behind very tightly sealed doors.

Real negotiations will not start until the debt ceiling clock ticks to within 10 seconds of when current federal expenditures officially reach the existing debt limit of $31.4 T. On May 1st Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that the US may exhaust its established “extraordinary measures” by June 1st (the so-called “X-date”) to pay its existing debt obligations. Until then, we will suffer from the Repubs’ self-righteous brinkmanship.

    Is this any way to operate a political economy? No. Besides the US only Denmark has a national debt ceiling that is an absolute amount of money. But while Dems occupy the White House and at least one side of Congress is controlled by the Repubs, that’s when dark energy may force our fiscal cookie to crumble with severely damaging consequences for everyone. It’s time for Rep. McCarthy to remove the dark energy cloud surrounding him and other Repubs and pass an almost-clean, significant public debt increase without delay or obstruction.