Germs are observable _today_, because we have powerful microscopes. For most of its existence, germ theory relied on unobservable entities, and it had to be supported by the fact that the theory fits the data, not through direct observation. Similarly, dark matter is observable in principle, just not with our current technology.
I don't know which aspects you think dark matter shares with miasma. Dark matter fits all the data; miasma doesn't.
miasma largely fit the data for a millennium, the same way dark matter largely fits the data. if you believed in germs in the 1600s, which is about where we are now with dark matter, you would have been considered insane, so i get where you're coming from.
the fact that dark matter is widely accepted without proof, and that the current model continues to encounter new anomalies, puts it about on the same level as strings for me—very cool and i hope it's real, but likely to be explained away when we better understand quantum physics and higher dimensions
Sorry, but you're just wrong. You can't look at a disease outbreak and explain the transmission among the population with a miasma-based statistical model. In other words, it doesn't fit the data.
And dark matter is not accepted without proof. It fits the data extremely well. That is the proof. It explains many unrelated phenomena and isn't ruled out by anything; just like gravity. The fact that we can explain why things fall down, why the moon orbits around the earth, why the earth orbits around the sun, why stars form, why planets form and a whole bunch of other phenomena with one force is the proof; we haven't seen a gravity particle, but that doesn't matter, because that's not how proof works in science.
It's not about thinking it's cool and hoping it's real either. It's simply the only explanation we have for a whole bunch of stuff, and it's a damn good explanation that's extremely simple.
That's not to say it's necessarily correct. It's just the only explanation we have, and we have no reason to believe it not to be correct.
in AD 700 one would absolutely have been able to explain an outbreak with a miasma-based model, and the explanation absolutely would have become consensus among the best and brightest. you can't apply what we know now to what was known at a given point in the past
> we can explain why things fall down
that's pretty new too! and it's not semantically correct, but was considered so for quite a while. this is a pretty good analogy for why i'm skeptical of dark matter
> It fits the data extremely well. That is the proof. It explains many unrelated phenomena and isn't ruled out by anything;
Suppose you had six frames of a ball moving in a parabolic trajectory. A sixth order polynomial would fit the data incredibly well, but I don't think you would accept it as a good model for the motion of the ball.
You can't say "it isn't ruled out by anything":
EFE rules out LCDM.
Galaxies are redshift >~ 7 rules out LCDM (we now have galaxies at redshift > 13).
I don't know which aspects you think dark matter shares with miasma. Dark matter fits all the data; miasma doesn't.