Cliff

Thank everyone for their feedback. I now realize using a photon for my idea was definitely wrong. The core concept was more that dark matter is some kind of structure for combining with and transferring energy. When it's not transferring energy it is still there but undetectable for some reason. Maybe it phases in and out of this dimension until it's activated. Maybe it always has to be moving at a speed we can't detect until it "syncs" with whatever energy is passed to it. Like tuning a guitar string to the proper note. So <dark matter> + <X type of energy> = <some particle>. So a particle never actually moves it's energy is just transferred so quickly it seems like it is. I think I understand you, Joigus, and the idea isn't possible in general. It might not even make sense. It's probably clear I don't have a full grasp of what "energy" actually is and I'm not sure the way I'm writing about it makes sense. Again, saying I'm a novice is kind, so thanks for the information. Gotta start somewhere.

I had this idea that I thought was interesting and wanted to share it with more knowledgeable people to see what they thought. I consider myself less than a physics newbie so please go easy on me if this is ridiculous or explained somewhere and I just didn’t find it. Anyway, the gist of the idea is this; Dark matter is basically an energy communications/transmission network for light energy made of de-energized photons. Since photons have no mass when they're de-energized they're undetectable. We don’t see photons move, but rather we see energy transferring from one photon to another. That energy transfer is so fast that it looks as if it’s the same photon moving but it’s the energy that’s moving by activating and then leaving countless photons as it goes. Transactions from photon to photon alone don’t lose energy and because dark matter is itself just de-energized photons moving energy through its existing structure doesn’t cause energy loss. However, if the energy must pass through other kinds of particles some of it is absorbed by them and usually expressed as heat. I’ve written out more about the implications this has on the double slit experiment, but I didn’t want to throw a mountain of words at anybody if the base idea doesn’t have any merit.

Yeah, but would they burn for hundreds or thousands of years? In my mind I just envisioned lava making contact with a huge oil fields completely igniting them vs. vegetation that would have limited burning time by comparison, and coal which seems like it would take more to ignite so much. It seems like a coal fire wouldn't spread to as much nearby coal as an oil fire would. Though there's no reason both couldn't be happening at once.

My apologies but I'm not sure I understand the point you're making. Is it that the oil is underground and doesn't have access to oxygen? I know that some oil makes it to the surface. I also wonder if all of that seismic activity and lava coming up from the ground could have moved even more to the surface?

Hello, everyone! A few weeks ago I had the idea that, contrary to my original thinking, the (relatively) slow burning of fossil fuels might be a good thing. The following is what got me thinking about that. What if one of the massive oil fields around the planet were to catch fire? Now, what if that happened to several at once? This got me thinking about mass extinction. Burning oil fields with no way to put them out would certainly begin to threaten life on the planet. I wondered if that had been considered for any of the previous mass extensions. Of course, as the internet has shown me over and over I'm almost certainly never the first to have any idea, and so I found that some newer studies suggest just that: https://www.livescience.com/17577-great-dying-coal-eruption.html Now this particular study suggests coal rather than oil which could also be the case since they burn similarly. Burning oil produces less carbon dioxide than coal but burning enough of either (or both) for hundreds or thousands of years would certainly explain the decrease in life and how it was kept at such low levels. Volcanic activity was the catalyst behind the Permian Extinction. There is plenty of evidence of massive eruptions. But would that on it's own be enough to take life down to the nearly completely obliterated levels of "The Great Dying"? I think fossil fuels burning in mass over that time explains nearly every "symptom" of what that world looked like according to the geological record. With those thoughts in mind, are we inadvertently lowering the planet's risk for another such event by burning those fuels off more slowly than a volcanic eruption would? This isn't an anti-environmental post. I just want to make that clear. It's just a thought. Hmmm ... and I thought I posted this under Earth Sciences. Would a moderator mind moving it? Thanks!