I find it curious that we cannot reach anything from the nearest stars to the most distant quasars unless we travel at near lightspeed. But all that we can see still represents only 4 percent of the universe, and the remaining 96 percent can't be reached no matter how fast we travel. No matter how fast we go we'll never get there, because it isn't space and time that we have to traverse ...

So we nail down an age and boundary of the visible universe only to discover a clue that the universe harbors 25-times as much matter and energy as we have just nailed down, but on a separate plane or hierarchy of existence. And we have found that it consists of both matter and energy, just like the visible universe, but in different proportions.

Suppose there wasn't just one type of dark matter and energy, but a whole periodic table of the stuff. Energy seems to dominate, leptons dominate hadrons. Perhaps the number of valence shells is far greater for dark matter, perhaps dark matter is simply heavier elements on the band of stability of the elements. The number of neutrons and protons along the band of stability does not increase directly, rather as the atomic number increases the band tends toward an excess of neutrons. The heaviest stable nucleus is Bismuth 209, above that are a few radioactive elements that decay quickly. Then the stability band fails, and there is no stable nucleus between Bismuth(209) and neutron stars.

But perhaps we have the answer in the proportion of dark matter and dark energy. Perhaps this indicates a continuation of the band of stability, somehow made invisible to modern sensors. An excess of leptons to hadrons might enhance the complexity of interaction between clumps of dark matter. That complexity might have unknown manifestations?

Opinions?