Quote Originally Posted by halfeye View Post
If the beams are (say) one degree wide, that would mean 179 pulsars we don't see, for every one we do.
As I said previously, it might not be as simple as an unweighted game of spin the bottle, but yes, that's pretty much the point.

That might be all the dark matter.
Well, as georgie just pointed out, a pulsar is still a neutral star, and it isn't emitting nothing outside of the beam angles. We could very well detect it even if the beam doesn't hit us--the issue is, we would have trouble differentiating it as a pulsar and not a regular neutron star.