A Humbling Thought

The leading theories about Earth mass extinction events are [bold added]

collisions between Earth and an asteroid or comet, and extended periods of massive volcanism.

Our sun crosses the dark matter plane (nature.com)

A number of scientists have proposed a third, albeit related explanation: the sun periodically passes through a "dark matter" disk that causes gravitational disruptions that trigger volcanoes and/or a rain of comets.

Dark matter is stuff whose nature remains unknown. It is more than five times as abundant as the familiar matter that atoms are made of, but tends to interact with atomic matter only through gravity.

The existence of dark matter has been theorized to explain astronomical phenomena, but dark matter has so far not been directly observed. Whether a DM disk bisects the Milky Way and whether the solar system crosses this disk and causes mass extinctions piles speculation upon speculation. Nevertheless....

The ancients knew about the sun, moon, stars, and planets but were completely wrong about how they all fit together. A humbling thought, because if our theories barely take into account a substance that is "five times [as] abundant" as regular matter, then we may have only touched the surface of how the universe really works.