Benjamin McGuire

It likely wouldn't happen. I'll provide a different scenario. Suppose that the woman claimed that a man raped her in his home - and that in the context of the rape, there was some violence, and there was blood from the victim left on the sheets. In a civil case, the judge cannot authorize a search warrant for law enforcement to search the defendant's home for that evidence. And while DNA is not considered testimony, there are substantial privacy and harm issues associated with the collection and analysis of a DNA sample. An accusation is almost never considered an appropriate basis for this kind of harm in a civil case. It is also part of the reason why civil cases have a lower bar than a criminal case. To put it a bit differently, if there is sufficient evidence on the part of the victim to get a warrant in a criminal investigation, then there is no need for the DNA sample in the civil case - the other evidence stands in its place. Similarly, a civil case couldn't compel a DNA check from a DNA database either (to avoid the need for a court order for the defendant). At the same time, the nature of a civil case is far different from a criminal case. The presence of DNA itself only confirms that sex occurred - and sex generally is not a criminal act or even a civil infraction. If this is going to a civil case, the likelihood is that the accused admits to having sex with the victim, but, contests the narrative - that is, claims that it was consensual. There are sometimes very fuzzy lines here - and the woman might have agreed to a date, agreed to dinner, agreed to go home with the accused, and even initially agreed to an intimate encounter, only at some point to decide to end it, and told the accused that they were no longer interested in having sex. Alcohol may have been involved. If the accused continued the intimate encounter, we likely have assault - but it becomes difficult to prove. All of these other issues add to a complexity in the case - and if law enforcement determines that whether or not consent was withdrawn that they cannot make the legal case of assault stick, they won't proceed with the investigation. That is, if they find that the woman's claims are not compelling, they won't touch it - the odds of conviction are low. The civil case then revolves largely around these narratives of what happened - and in this situation, the DNA from the rape test is irrelevant. The person who could present DNA evidence as being relevant is the defendant and not the accuser - because if he really didn't have sex with her, he can submit that DNA to exonerate himself of the accusations. The accuser would be required to provide the defendant with the results of that rape test - and the defendant could then make the determination about what to do with that information. What is more relevant is the time frame in which the rape was reported. The courts have absolutely zero interest in proving a violation of the Honor Code - the fact that a DNA test could do this would create potential harm for the defendant, and so would actually be an argument against the judge ordering a DNA test. And if the rape test was a few days after the alleged assault, it creates a narrative that will almost certainly be employed by the defense of remorse on the victim's part leading to their efforts to re-frame the encounter. The whole BYU honor code thing is a sensitive topic at BYU. It hasn't been that long since there were claims that BYU violated Title IX rules by having their Title IX investigations given to the Honor Code Office - who then investigated assault victims for honor code violations. This wouldn't help the victim's case. In any case, this is all completely different from paternity suits where DNA is always going to accurately identify whether a person is the father of a child or not. You can see the same sort of thing in testing for cancer linked to certain types of biological and chemical exposures, and so on. It is this level of engagement with DNA that is generally understood as meeting the burden of "the DNA is relevant". I could envision a case where this could be applied - if the case involved incest, for example, and that incest was part of the suit, then DNA could say something definitive. If the DNA cannot answer the actual question in the suit (that is, if it cannot establish that assault occurred), then it cannot generally be compelled in a civil case.

Not generally. The main exception to this would be a paternity case, or sometimes other medical claims. The rules for compelling DNA are generally understood in civil cases as being under the purview of Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 35. And in that context, much more deference is given to the defendant than to the accuser. There has to be a substantial reason for the DNA evidence - and, if it is an attempt to try and discover evidence, you generally will only get a judge to sign off on it for the defendant looking for exculpatory evidence - that is, if there is a chance that DNA evidence would refute the claims instead of substantiating them. Accusers are generally not allowed to go on fishing expeditions for evidence.

It's been almost 27 years now. It's good to be reminded sometimes.

This brought to mind two things that are a bit macabre together. When we were younger, we lived an hour from the Church. We would drive to church in that big Ford Econoline van. And routinely, we would be halfway home, and it would be unusually peaceful and quiet in the van, and then someone would ask ... "Where's Fred?" Our home teacher would bring him over later in the evening. On June 29th, 1998, at the age of 23, Frederic passed in a boating accident when sailing on Lake Michigan. The rest of us have all aged, but he will remains 23 years old.

While this is all very interesting, it is also interesting that the subject at the root of all this is this report. What is interesting is that while the newspaper article author is the one who introduced the map and the individuals that get named, the report itself isn't particularly interested in specific examples. It notes this: The mental health issues that are addressed in the paper are specific - the exposure to natural environments helps with mental health. However - and I think this should be obvious - the loss of available natural play areas is going to be a factor. This study deals with a secondary issue that I really didn't touch: The fact that limiting children's unattended time in public roads resulted in an almost 90% drop in child fatalities caused by automobiles is not an insubstantial thing - and far more important to parents if you are planning on having only one or two children (rather than the thirteen that I grew up with). Look, there's no question that parenting has become more difficult. There is more pressure on parents to be perfect. Parenting is far more expensive than it was generations ago. We have shifted from single family income jobs to the general necessity for two parent wage earners. There are the complexities of the digital age (in the research, children could identify Pokemon much more accurately than native British wildlife). And of course, in all of this, there is the problem of trying to find some sort of personal balance. It may be tongue in cheek, but this opinion piece suggested: What are the things that are causing all the problems? You aren't going to give kids back playtime in the streets. You just won't. Perhaps we can give parents more time to parent. But that would require us to start paying people real living wages. Let's raise the minimum wage substantially ($25+ an hour). Let's require mandatory paid vacation time, and paid parental leave time - maybe even a 32 hour work week. Let's radically reduce mandatory overtime. Let's subsidize good daycare - and better yet, let's do so by encouraging it in spaces connected to the workspace. Let's create more public nature spaces (accumulate instead of getting rid of public land). Let's extend free education another four years - to include a 4 year degree - so that the need to drive over-achievement for that scholarship will drop, and the financial concerns are reduced. Let's provide better curated time for children (free summer camps - especially for urban families). Let's invest in quality public media programming (more PBS) - if there is going to be screen time, let's create a range of commercial free quality options. Let's invest in more bike and walking paths - that don't share space with automobiles. And let's stop trying to make children wage earners. When I mentioned that childhood is a relative new thing - it is because it marked the beginning of the end of child labor. Yes, this is all an oversimplification - but I am trying to point to the size and scope of the problem. It isn't just about getting the kids out into nature - so that they become a bit more healthy. It's about trying to make parenting more manageable since we are doing our best (collectively) to make it as difficult as we can. The thing is, parental and social concerns that have led to these circumstances are reasonable and rational in the context in which these decisions have been made. If we went back to children playing in the streets today (as they did four generations ago), child deaths would skyrocket. The profound sea changes that have shaped parenting today are not this sort of shrinking space in which children play - that's only a symptom. The sea changes are the economic changes (the push for women to enter the workspace after WWII, the loss of the family wage, the necessity of advanced education, the costs of childcare, the increases in poverty and economic inequality), the drops in fertility rates are closely associated with those economic changes, and finally we have the increase in technological complexity. Screen time made an easy substitute for playing in the streets. The fact remains that we will be unlikely to make any real headway in these areas ...

See, this is where it all goes off the rails. Childhood is a relatively modern invention. Childhood, as the sort of thing you are thinking of, didn't exist before the 17th century (it didn't exist either conceptually or materially). So the idea that your childhood was similar to the childhood of those in the past is a problem. There is little doubt that your childhood was similar to your parents. And to some extent that theirs was similar to their parents. But at some point, those similarities kind of stop. At the same time, there are cultural issues that we should also bring up. I spent a month in Japan last fall (much of it in Tokyo and Kyoto, with a trip south to Hiroshima). And, true to expectation, I saw small children getting themselves to school. I myself (along with my siblings) spent a great deal of time wandering the neighborhood (and by neighborhood, I mean that we lived in rural Michigan, and had four homes on our road when I was a child, and we could walk miles through the woods without encountering other people). The US has a relatively high child homicide rate. It peaked in the early 1990s, with huge increases starting in the mid-1980s. This coincided, by the way, with a large surge in media representations of this - CSI started in 2000 (my family watched it pretty regularly for years). In 1990, the US homicide rate for children was 7.4 per 100,000. This is below the overall homicide rate which was 9.4. Japan's overall homicide rate in 1990 was 0.5 per 100,000 - and estimates of child homicides (where we don't have exact data for that year) are closer to 0.2 per 100,000. So, I think that you can make a strong argument that there is correlation here (not necessarily causation of course) between child murders and child freedom. Even though homicide rates for children are declining, this is a change that takes a long time to sink in. At least most of our kids today don't have the drills that we had as children. Getting under that little school desk with our heads between our legs wasn't really going to do all that much if we were near something targeted by a nuclear weapon ... At the same time, there is a separate issue. Going back to my anecdotal experience, I was the 5th of 13 children in my family - which was unusual even at that point in time. While US birthrates have been in steady decline, Japan had already experienced much more significant birth rate declines. It seems much more likely that the close connection between the shift in treatment of children is caused by the increased value placed on children caused by scarcity. What I mean by that is that my parents provided absolutely nothing in terms of financial support for me once I moved out of the house (which I did just before I turned 16). On the other hand, I have continued to provide support for my kids as my resources have allowed. Michigan Tech cost about $40,000 a year. When your great grandparents were in school (assuming that they finished high school) they didn't have robotics competitions, band camp, the school plays or musical productions. They didn't travel across the country for school competitions. And, of course, day care didn't cost an average of $10,000 a year (as it does in Michigan right now). It is because we invest so much in our children that we tend to have an interest in protecting that investment (especially since we can't afford to keep pumping out kids after the first two or three). Estimates are that raising a child to 18 costs between $300,000 and $400,000. Who wants to sink $250,000 into a kid only to lose it all to an accident caused by a drunk driver. Our child homicide rates have been declining consistently since that peak in the early 1990s. And our valuing of children (as a society) has been growing as fertility rates have been declining. It is these things that make us able to start asking the questions that you are asking. And yet, at the same time, we should also be questioning other things. Consider, for example, the fact that in Japan, with its super low homicide rates (0.23 per 100,000), there were only 178,140 legally owned guns in 2023. There are just under 18 million children in Japan. In the US, the number of guns privately owned is estimated between 400 and 500 million. We have 72.8 million children, and a current overall homicide rate of 5.7 per 100,000. We could also make the suggestion that guns in our country have ruined childhoods - the correlation is certainly there. So could we create both actually safer communities for children and the perception that our communities are safer? Probably. But, I think that our political environment is such that those who want to most aggressively promote increases in fertility rates are those that are least interested in taking the steps to make communities safer and to reduce the costs of raising children. It is a catch-22.

Generally yes. And I would say that the problems are even similar - except for a couple of things. The Higgs Boson was predicted half a century ago. It was a necessary particle for General Relativity. It was demonstrated mathematically long before we had the technology to test for it. And when we managed to develop the technology so that the test could be performed, the tests provided evidence that the Higgs Boson existed. That we could predict this mathematically - decades before it could be tested and then to have those tests confirm the theory provides a very strong confirmation of the theory as a whole (even if it is incomplete). So we have a mathematical necessity for Dark Matter under the broadly accepted current model. This isn't the only possible explanation - it's a necessary component of the the big bang theory that we currently have. But, suppose that we modify the big bang, and instead of a single singularity exploding once into the universe as we know it, we have a series of explosions. If we make the beginning a bit more "wobbly," perhaps we don't need dark matter at all. But in any case, Dark Matter isn't simply hypothesized. We have things that suggest evidence for the theory - if we can't observe it directly, we can observe its impact on things we can observe (like light, which appears to move when it hits the curvature of space-time believed to be caused by dark matter). Which brings us back to the question of the Electric Universe. In the Electric Universe model, bodies of mass in the solar system were argued to have been ejected by the sun due to the polarized electrical charge of these objects. These objects are supposed to maintain that polarized charge, and it is this electrical charge (and not gravity) that keeps these objects in their respective orbits in the solar system. This was why, when the probes to comets were announced, the leading figures of the EU model suggested that you could never land on one with a probe - the contact would generate an arc of electricity that would destroy the probe. This didn't happen. (At least one of the videos discussed here mentions this). The problem with the EU is that it hasn't generated any empirical evidence in part because there is no real mathematical model behind it. The claims have never reached that level - in part because some of them seem so absurd - especially in light of the things that we do know with some certainty about physics. So we can't really compare Dark Matter with something like the EU. We certainly can't compare the EU with the Higgs Boson. If the EU could come up with some predictions that were proven right - and if their theories could be put into discrete theories and mathematical equations that would allow us to make predictions and test them, then we could move forward. But until then, it largely remains in the realm of pseudo-science. Despite the fact that there seems to be an effort to embrace our better telescopes, the hopes of those who favor the electric universe model have not been borne out by these technological developments. Better telescopes have only increased evidence for gravitational lensing. They have only improved our Cosmic Microwave Background measurements. Both of these things are inherently contradictory to the Electric Universe model. And our ability to see back into the past has only increased our belief and understanding of fusion as the energy driver of stars - not some sort of massive cosmic electrical pathway. I'll explain why I labeled it this way. First, we can't actually smell space because it's a vacuum. There is no mechanism for breathing it in - for moving the matter past our olfactory organs. We can only pretend like space is some sort of medium that we could breath in and see if there is enough density in the matter that is there to smell it. But, our anatomy doesn't work that way - and the theory here suggests that we could simply collect the density of matter and compare that with the matter that we can smell. Which brings us to the second point - Earth's atmosphere at sea level contains approximately 25 billion, billion (quintillion) molecules per cubic centimeter. Deep space typically has less than 1 atom on average per cubic centimeter. Somewhere in between is this 3-10 particles per cubic centimeter that the video mentions. If these particles are much larger than single molecules, they won't create odors in space locks when air is added back in. And if they are molecule sized, we are looking at a ratio of 3-10 parts per 25 quintillion? Even the most detectable smells that we know are nowhere near that level. Mercaptans have an olfactory threshold of 1-2 parts per billion. That solar wind at 3-10 parts per cubic centimeter would be so far below that threshold to be unnoticeable when introduced to us in breathable air. So the best that I can describe this as a metaphor. What would space smell like, if we took the materials that we detect and crank them up to smellable levels? And since that wouldn't be what space really smells like (even if we could smell in space), the whole thing is sort of a fantasy - and here it is a fantasy being used to promote the electric universe model - it is the click bait for the title. The whole thing reminds me of a line from the movie The Matrix, where Agent Smith tells Neo: Of course, it's a digital reality in which everything is really simply a virtual impression made on the brain by induced electrical impulses. That smell (in the movie) is a metaphor. The strangeness for me is the videos attempt to assert that it isn't really a metaphor, its a reality and that it really means something for this bad theory.

For those who are interested, Kraft republished the essay as Chapter 3 of his Exploring the Scripturesque: Jewish Texts and their Christian Contexts (Brill, 2009). This is the copy that I have. Of course, the article, as you note, was published in 1978. And it probably would be more useful - particularly when we discuss a text like First Enoch, to address the current scholarship (of which there is certainly plenty), instead of something nearly 50 years old. My personal collection is extensive. The stuff that comes out of Enoch isn't exactly earth shaking. Yes, Enoch discusses the Son of Man (but so does Daniel, right?). The thing is, though, in Enoch, the Son of Man is Enoch himself. Probably the best current text dealing with these ideas with regard to First Enoch is the 2013 Parables of Enoch: A Paradigm Shift. It has two chapters dating that section of the text. And in Chapter 4, the argument is made that this section was likely authored during the lifetime of Jesus. It makes 7 points in the conclusion: The early complaints about this literature and the way that it gets read are really not as valid as they were fifty years ago. These issues are being taken into consideration. The challenge is that what we don't get is this sense of a deliberate removal of material from Jewish scripture over the whole Christian thing. Most of the claims about this happening that were made by early Christians themselves seem to be hyperbolic. When we look at the texts in context, it shows that early Christian literature (including the scriptural texts) fit well into the late second temple period. But the question of how Christianity uses these texts is also becoming clearer. Your quote from Kraft (as found in Barker) just presents the first half of Kraft's argument - here is the rest of it: So, we are still at that problem with your assertion: It's just not there - and your references don't put it in there. The reality is that Enoch is a relatively late Jewish text. And it isn't widely adopted because it wasn't created in the thought of rabbinic Judaism. As Kraft also notes: A couple of decades earlier, in North Africa, Tertullian had revealed similar reticence in citing the book of Enoch regarding fallen angels, in full recognition that some Christians rejected it because it was not included by the Jews in their scriptural collection (Cult Fem 1.3). Tertullian writes this in 197 CE. This means that the Book of Mormon has been around longer now than the complete First Enoch had been when Tertullian wrote. The Jewish Canon was developed in stages. First was the effective canonization of the Pentateuch (the Torah). By 200 BCE, the Prophets had reached its effectively final list (the Nevi'im). First Enoch wasn't included here in any form - and its something we wouldn't have expected - it was simply too new (and as I note, it wasn't completed unto sometime between 40 BCE and 70 CE). So, along with the issues discussed, it shouldn't surprise us that mainstream Judaism generally ignored it - and not because of the fact that early Christians, who were looking for apocalyptic literature grabbed a hold of it, and began to reinterpret it in their own context. One final note on this comment: The problem here is that your arguments about the Dead Sea Scrolls actually undermine this position. I'll explain what I mean. I can't verify the quotes here. I only have a second edition of Kahle's text. The text that you provide here comes from Hugh Nibley's Mormonism and Early Christianity - and he references the first edition. What I can say, with absolute certainty, is that none of Nibley's quotes appear in the second edition. And, citing the Dead Sea Scrolls, Kahle, assuming that he wrote the things that Nibley quotes, has walked them all back. He does write this - and this is an early assessment: No one questions this anymore - it is consistently believed that the LXX was a Greek translation of the Old Testament that pre-dates Christianity. Using Nibley (who is using a badly dated source) is problematic. The Cario Geniza itself is a bad context in which to deal with this - it was a place to dispose of old texts - and it operated between the 9th and 12 centuries CE (some of the texts go back as far as 600 CE) - and there are a few scraps that are much later into the 19th century). So the ideas that are drawn from this collection if we try to move it too far into the past. What we can also say (to connect this to the above comments) is that while lots of copies of Jubilees are found there (a much more mainstream interpretation of scripture), and there are a batch of texts from Qumran that find there way into the Cairo Geniza, there are zero fragments of Enoch. At any rate, I think that Mormonism as a whole tends to have problems with late Jewish and early Christian writings and a certain tendency to engage in parallelomania. They try to reinterpret those texts in light of present day speculation - and then they try to suggest that those speculations are what the texts originally meant ...

It's nonsense because the Dead Sea Scrolls do not "show that Jews were systematically editing Christian prooftexts out of the Old Testament and burning all Hebrew copies of other books because of their Christ-figures and Great Angel characters." That is what is nonsense. But to get to what you just posted: So here is the problem that you have. The Dead Sea Scrolls contained a lot of sectarian documents. Perhaps these were considered scripture by the group that used them. But, it seems unlikely - they were not held up to that level of authority that the well known and widely circulated scriptural texts were given. So I think that it is reasonable to argue that the First Book of Enoch was not Hebrew scripture - that it was never Hebrew scripture - even if it was given some status in certain circles. Of course, it's easy to make arguments from negative evidence. Clearly, there is no evidence that it was in the Hebrew Scriptures, because, as you claim, the "Jews were ... systematically editing [it] out". The challenge is that the couple of references in the New Testament aren't that helpful. We don't, after all, think that Epimenides or Menander were considered Hebrew Scriptures either - and yet there they are. The Dead Sea Scrolls also contained fifteen copies of Jubilees. Like First Enoch, Jubilees was considered commentary - it was never given the status of Hebrew scripture. It's existence as Qumran doesn't give it that status either. The fact that these texts aren't popular isn't a result of some sort of grand plot. Enoch has challenges that made it popular for the Qumran community but not for other groups of Jews - and the biggest of these was the calendar problem. Enoch's calendar had 12 months which added up to exactly 364 days a year. The traditional Jewish calendar used a cycle of 12 month years with an occasional 13 month year. This created political and religious problems for the community at Qumran when their holy feasts were on a different schedule from the rest of the Jewish community. The Book of Enoch's lack of popularity is much more attributable to this issue than to any differences over messianic figures. No. It wasn't used as a proof text for Christianity. And it certainly didn't last very long in Christianity as a whole - even though its use in the New Testament (of very small pieces) gave it some longevity, it never had wide-scale popularity or support in early Christianity, and was effectively removed in the fourth century. This is another one of those modern myths, isn't it. We are now up to more than 150 manuscripts (mostly fragmentary) of First Enoch. The most complete are Ethiopic - but interestingly enough, the oldest of these manuscripts only dates back to the 14th century. When we look at the Greek and Aramaic texts, what we see if often quite different from the Ethiopic text - and what we can with some certainty is that the Ethiopic version of First Enoch is not particularly representative of the text of First Enoch that would have existed in the Second Temple period. That they are based on the same textual tradition is undisputed. But the Aramaic is in places radically different. The Parables/Similitudes section of First Enoch has no known Aramaic or early Greek version at all. So, was it saved? It's not as simple as you suggest. No. It wasn't. The idea that the Jews repressed First Enoch is an unsubstantiated claim first made by R.H. Charlesworth in 1912, who wrote this: "Its suppression by the Jews was owing to its Messianic character." However, there is no mention made of First Enoch in any Talmudic or Rabbinic writing that mentions First Enoch in connection with burning texts. The reality is that Rabbinic Judaism rejected it because of its non-messianic content - the idea of angels having sex with women, its calendar (which I already mentioned) and so on. We cannot find anything that would work as evidence for Charlesworth's claim - and so generally, his suggestion is largely rejected by academics today. What is fascinating to me is the way that this can be juxtaposed with other actual proof-texts used by early Christians - Isaiah, for example. The Jews certainly didn't repress Isaiah because it was utilized as a proof-text for Christianity, did they ... There are no Greek or Aramaic fragments that cover this section of the text. None. While there may have been earlier versions (there may have been an Aramaic original with a Greek intermediary) there is nothing there. The Dead Sea Scrolls cannot help here - because we would expect (if it had existed) for bits of it to have been found in Qumran. They weren't. As Larry Hurtado noted a few years ago, referencing the work of Loren Stuckenbruck: I think that there is a real risk in trying to make the unpopularity of a text into some sort of concerted effort to get rid of it.

This is all nonsense.

Yeah. It's deceptive. Do you know which part of Earth's atmosphere is the hottest? The thermosphere - it is between 86 and 372 miles above the earth. The temperature in that band ranges from 930 degrees F to 3600 degrees F. It is also true that if you were sitting in that space for more than a brief few moments, you would freeze to death. When you talk about the smell of the universe and you start by using some of the most dense areas of space (that's the bit there about particles per cubic centimeter), where you can best make the argument, and you ignore the fact that this represents only a tiny fraction of space (like a completely minuscule amount), we can start talking about the fact that at the very best sort of understanding, this can only represent a very local sort of observation. It cannot help us understand the universe as we know it. The smelling is, as we all recognize, more of a metaphor - but replacing real science with metaphor is another key tactic of pseudo-science.

Let me respond to this - What you are describing is the heart of what we identify as pseudo-science. Science is not about hypothesis and argument. Using those terms in a sort of ambiguous way is part of the problem here. Science is about testable (and so falsifiable) hypothesis and argument. It isn't enough to simply theorize that measles isn't caused by a virus - you have to have a theory that comes with some recognized way to test that theory. Until the presentation is made where someone would not only theorize that measles is not a virus, and can provide tests that show that measles isn't a virus - as well as showing that the tests were performed and that the outcomes of those tests verified the hypothesis - then, and only then, is it something that should be taken seriously in contrast to the established science (which has also done the same thing). We have some good examples of the scientific blinders in action (at least as you describe them). They created problems - not because of alternative theories - but because the original theory seemed to work so well given the test data that confirmed the theory. One of the most fascinating was the Beta-Amyloid theories and their role in dementia and Alzheimer's. In 2006, a study came out that showed the first really strong connection between the protein and the disease. And that research marked a strong shift in the trajectory of the research. That paper was retracted last year after the data was proven to be falsified. It probably caused some waste in terms of research efforts. But we aren't really talking about that here in terms of the Electrical Universe Model. You should really do the reading on the model if you are going to argue about it. The lack of dark matter is only a tiny part of the model - and if that's your major interest in it, then there are lots of better places to look. The real reason why this model was abandoned in the 1990s is very simple - the Hubble Telescope came on-line. Being able to see into deep space allows us to look far back into the cosmic history (light coming from great distances away shows us things that happened billions of years in the past). And we started observing, for the first time, young stars, and around those stars, proplyds - the disks of matter that form into planets - as hypothesized by more traditional cosmology using the gravity models. What we don't see in any of this look into deep space (and the distant past) is anything at all of the sort that we would expect using the Electric Universe Model. It simply isn't there. The ability (and technology) to explore comets reflects another side of this. The comets, cosmologists theorized, were created in the early formation of the solar system. And if this were true, then we would expect certain types of features and makeup of these objects moving through space. The Electric Universe Model claims that these objects were freed from existing stars by massive bolts of lightning like electricity. But when we start observing the actual makeup of these objects - especially up close - we discover that their makeup is consistent with formation during the earliest periods of the solar system - and not at all with some sort of explosion freeing these bodies from the sun (in the electric universe model, all of these objects in space in the solar system were violently ejected from the sun). That formation is built into the structure of these objects. And we see this even better now that have started sending probes to comets and other objects that are very distant from our planet. At any rate - whether or not there is dark matter is not a question that the electric universe model can answer - because there aren't any real questions that the electric universe model can answer. There is no hypothesis dependent on that model that can be answered by some sort of falsifiable test. There is no data that can be used to support this. So we get a video like this that says that the universe has a "smell" - and this becomes support for the model - that should tell us something - both about the model and the sort of desperation that exists to find some sort of evidence that supports it.

Matt Finn - if you go to the Youtube page, and follow the links, you will discover that he is the author of a book: Breath of Life - a self published science fiction novel. In the introduction to that Book, he describes himself like this: The author is not an expert. This doesn't necessarily make him a hack, a fraud, or a pseudo-science. But, his association with The Thunderbolts Project (which is the primary proponent of the Electric Universe Model) is what makes him (arguably) a hack, a fraud, and a pseudo-scientist. The problem with the Electric Universe Model is that to date, there is absolutely zero empirical evidence that supports it. And when we get to the events that could provide support - it simply isn't there. A good example would be the samples taken in the 2005 Deep Impact mission. Even more important was the data collected about Churyumov–Gerasimenko (67P) in 2016. The data collected here generally supports our traditional understanding of the formation of the solar system - it does not provide anything close to the radical break from that understanding that would be required in the Electric Universe Model. When we look at the predictions that have been made - in particular those made in the lead up to the 2005 Deep Impact Mission, we find that they were all wrong. We did find significant ice in the comet. There was no electrical discharge towards the exploration craft. There was no unexpected radiation emission, and so on. When the model produces testable predictions that actually work - then we can start talking about evidence here. But as it stands, I think there is no real reason to accept it. I realize that the model might have some appeal for certain small groups of LDS members - I remember back in the 1980s when Anthony Larson stirred up interest in Velikovsky and his cosmic catstrophism. But ... none of this can be called science.

It is true that my simplistic explanation isn't as complex as reality but - when you start talking about "pull" you are making a categorical mistake. There is no "pull". This was the whole point of the idea of entropy. Objects don't pull things - an object curves space-time, and other objects tend to want to follow the curve. Gravity isn't something that takes an effect in any situation - because gravity isn't a force - it is simply the label we give to the process of objects (mass or energy) following the curve of space-time in an entropic fashion. On top of this, the curving of space-time is a local thing. A single object doesn't curve all of space-time in the universe - only locally (relativity makes this reasonably certain). So, while the Higgs field is present everywhere, the Higgs field isn't gravity - and the curvature of space-time is a local phenomenon (which doesn't mean that really large dense objects like super-massive black holes don't create correspondingly large curvatures). The observable universe is mostly flat. And the reality is that we are not experiencing the effects of the curvature caused by all of the other objects in the universe. The "reach" of gravity seems quite finite.