[posterboy]

Yes, that must be it. Everything else about astronomy I'm perfectly fine with, but dark matter makes me feel insignificant. It's no problem however that many ... equate dark matter with some tangible notion of one theory or another and that their (and my) ignorance is staggering; Or that a negative result, like we can't bring two calculations into agreement, is treated like a result that found a real thing, while it's quite the opposite.

The simple problem is that DM is often defined as "a form of matter", when it could be multiple different forms. It's just the semantics that irks me. And then, if they will find maybe a new particle to account for at least some of the motion we couldn't explain, I will still be on the fence, because its not clear at all how to distinguish such from a virtual particle. That's nevertheless just a matter of semantics. The actual theory is probably way over my head. Therefore, doubt about the prediction for dark matter is just as much provoked by curiosity as for the proposed explanations. Ultimately, most explanations would be, in a mundane sense, turn out rather boring. So the question is, what's the deeper insight, as it goes for cosmology, what's the significance for life in general? There's a lot we don't know? I didn't even know that!