DeanZine - April 2004
Black Hole to Swallow Planet Earth!!!
Hubble Telescope Discovers Black Hole Hurtling Towards Earth!
I was sitting around over the weekend, worrying about how to scrape up enough money to pay my exorbitant electrical bill when I stumbled upon this disturbing factoid on the English translation of the online version of the Russian newspaper Pravda. It described the following doomsday scenario:
According to the article, confirmed and substantiated by NASA and respected scientific journals and news organizations around the globe, it turns out that the Hubble Telescope has discovered a black hole, no more than 5 or 6 thousand light years away in our own Milky Way galaxy, hurtling straight for the planet Earth!
The stellar-mass black hole, affectionately nicknamed, GRO J1655-40, is streaking across space at a rate of 250,000 miles per hour and heading in our direction with unerring accuracy.
I'm not making this one up folks. And for those skeptics among you, who may be questioning my veracity and suspect this to be some belated April fools joke, I provide conclusive and irrefutable source material below which will confirm these startling and disturbing assertions.
And we're not talking some meteor or giant snow-ball comet here either, with the potential to maybe take a tiny nick out of the South Pole or New Zealand (sorry Matthew Parker, my one fan from New Zealand). No, I'm talking about a full blown ultra-super-duper-mega-jumbo sized dense black hole that eats star systems for breakfast and can put away our entire solar system - sun, 9 planets, meteor belt, plus about 8,927 pieces of man-made, space junk - and still have room to gobble up Alpha Centauri A, B and C (the three closest stars to our sun) then top it off with a six-pack.
Nervous yet? Well, if you aren't, you should be. For those of you unfamiliar with them, a black hole can be a pretty nasty piece of work. First of all, they're so infinitely small and so extraordinarily dense, with such overwhelming gravitational pull, that not even light can escape them. Thus their name - black hole (as opposed to chartreuse hole or polka dot hole or the unfathomable void). Actually, now that I think of it, 'The Unfathomable Void' is not such a bad idea for these badboy singularities. It's certainly a lot catchier than GRO J1655-40. I'll have to pop off an email to the Royal Astronomical Society.
But I digress. The point is black holes mean business. They suck up everything in their path like a galactic Hoover. And this one's heading our way.
Now you might well ask yourself: 'Well, Dean, if this is really so, how come it's not on the front page of the New York Times or the Sun or on the headlines on CNN? Why are we hearing about this impending doom on some obscure singer/songwriter's website? Aren't you just making this all up?'
Nope. I'm not. It's all true and the multinational conglomerates that control the perpetually merging and increasingly monopolistic media outlets on this planet have once again conspired to spoon feed us the info-pablum necessary to keep us docile and subservient. Sure we can handle news of a regional war here or there; such news will even help justify more windfall oil profits. But let people know that their entire solar system is on the verge of being masticated by a marauding star muncher? No way. Do you think that, faced with such news, ordinary citizens will bother to pay their income tax? Not me, folks! (ha, ha)
Anyway, but hold on just a minute. All is not lost.
At least not right away.
The truth is, even though this 'unfathomable void' is heading straight for us with our number on it, you'll be somewhat relieved to know that it's still a good 5,000 light-years away, off somewhere in the neighborhood of the constellation Scorpius.
Now for those of you who were daydreaming during the Astronomy section of your science class, a light year is 5,865,696,000,000 miles long, making our pesky black hole GRO J1655-40 a mere 29,328,480,000,000,000 miles away (give or take a few parsecs).
So, just do the math: This means that even if GRO J1655-40 doesn't make any pit stops on the way - say, to fuel up, grab a donut and a cup of coffee, and call its mother - traveling, as it is, at a speed of a quarter of a million miles an hour, it's still gonna take it around 13,392,000,000 years to finally get here.
Now, that might still be some cause for concern, until you consider the following: our sun, estimated to be around 4.5 billion years old, has already used up almost half of its nuclear fuel (hydrogen) and in just about 5 billion years from today, it will start to die out. First, expanding into a red giant, than dispersing and contracting into a nebula, then a white dwarf and finally a black dwarf which is essentially a dead star made of highly compressed carbon (and possibly filled with shiny diamonds!)
The point is, by the time GRO J1655-40 finally makes its way here - our whole solar system will have already had a huge CONDEMNED sign posted on it, with CAUTION - DO NOT ENTER COLLAPSING SOLAR SYSTEM stickers plastered at every entrance.
So what should we conclude from all this?
Three things: 1. The media lies. 2. There's a lot of junk floating around out in space, and 3. There's no point in worrying about something that's not gonna even happen for another 13 billion years. Especially seeing as our own solar system is gonna start collapsing before that something even gets here.
Taking this to heart, I realized that there was nothing I could do about the electric bill until Monday morning, anyway, so what was the point of spending all weekend worrying about it? Also I had come up with one more justification for not paying my taxes on time - again. And finally, it occurred to me that if we all just wait around for a really long time, there'll be enough pure, high-quality diamonds left on our collapsed sun for everyone on of us to afford a nice long luxury Cruise to the Andromeda galaxy, which I understand is very pleasant this time of year.
Anyone for 18 black-holes of golf?
See ya next month,
Dean
http://english.pravda.ru/main/2002/12/02/40259.html
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2002/30/text/
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/sun/sundeath.shtml
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