Holy cosmic guacamole! It’s the end of the world! No, the end of the galaxy! No, the end of the universe! No, the end of Donald Trump!

No, it won't look like this. You should be so lucky.

Fortunately for everyone involved, it’s all probably going to take a while. That black hole that scientists found, or announced that they found earlier this week, is 55 million light years away from earth. So we don’t have to sweat it. 

At least not for a few days. 

But maybe by next month.

Here’s my thinking on that.

A black hole, in case you’ve been hibernating so deep in a black hole of your own that you’ve missed the news, is a kind of gravitational vacuum cleaner in space. It’s so powerful that it permanently sucks up everything that comes near it, compressing the mass of the stuff it swallows, then adding the new mass to the old mass.

Quantum physics for dummies

Now, gravity equals mass times momentum. So, even if things keep going along at the same rate of speed, the more mass the black hole gobbles up, the more its gravitational power grows. 

Anything that falls into a black hole never gets out again. It just gets squished into a mushed-together clump of gravitational whatever-the-hell it is. Its gravitational pull is so powerful that even light can’t get out of it.

I confess that all this is kind of, oh let’s say several thousand light years above my pay grade. So let's just consider everything that's said here an interpretive extrapolation. Or a speculative construction. Or a conflative reduction, whatever the hell that means. 

Even so, it seems to me that like the ramjet whose behavior can be described as, “the faster it goes, the faster it goes,” the rule of thumb on black holes ought to be, “the more it eats, the more it eats.”

It’s not just an insatiable appetite. It’s an appetite that gets increased by eating. Which means that in time, it will eat its entire galaxy. Which will make it even hungrier — okay, more gravitational, if you insist. Which means it will start eating other galaxies. Which will make it even hungrier. Until it finally eats our own galaxy. Although I understand our own galaxy has its own black hole to worry about.

Salt the margarita glasses now, Mabel

‘cos we’re all just cosmic guacamole

Shorter version? You, and I, and whatever political philosophy we rode in on are doomed to get squished into an extremely dense, and probably highly unappetizing form of cosmic guacamole.

There’s no escape. Not even for those well-heeled Silicon Valley dudes who bought up property in New Zealand to stay safe when “It” happens. Because “It” is global this time. In fact, it might be universal.

Even the Silicon Valley guys who took the trouble and the mega millions to build a rocket ship outta here won’t escape. (Got that, Mr. Space X?) Because the black hole gravity is so powerful, nothing’s getting outta here. And even if they got out, where would they go? The moon, and Mars, and the planet Venus, and the planet Saturn, and the former planet Pluto, and Jupiter are all getting squished into the same bowl, or hole, or guacamole. Ditto the Milky Way.

That’s the bad news. 

The good news is, so is Trump.

What will Trump do?

Not that I expect The Trumpster to take it lying down. First of all, he's probably familiar with the concept of black holes. Why do I think that? Because his attorney general is making one in which to insert any meaningful findings of the Muller investigation. But I digress.

If Black Hole Panic begins to spread during the next election campaign, you can count on Trump to do two things. Well, come to think of it, three things:

1. Find a way to blame it on Hillary and Obama.

2. Promise us that he alone can fix it.

3. Demand immediate appropriations to build a wall around the Milky Way to keep the black hole out. (And that will, of course, work no better than a wall on our southern border will keep out immigrants. There’s no stopping a massive mass, whether it’s a mass of matter or a huddled mass of immigrants yearning to breathe free.)

Meanwhile, expect all the usual suspects to have a field day with this.

Look out for “They”

The conspiracy theorists are going to point out that “They’re not telling us,” how fast the black hole is growing, or how long it’ll be before it swallows up the earth.

The “They” who aren’t telling us are, of course, are The Deep State. Or Democrats. Or “The Muslims.” Or “The Jews.” Or Socialists. Or Barack and Hillary. Or paid professional Crisis Actors from the Stanislavsky School of Method Crisis Acting, reconstituted as an evil cabal of conspiring astrophysicists. Or whatever They is at the top of the secret conspiracy list this week. 

And why aren’t They telling us? So that we won’t panic  and riot and destroy property, of course. Because property values are property values, even when your 500-acre weekend ranch and your $50 million yacht are both ninety seconds short of getting squinched down to the size of Donald Trump’s you-know-what. 

Or They’re not telling us so that They can institute Sharia Law. Or so that They can get all the jellybeans before the Apocalpse. Or, most likely of all, because They have just enough space ships to take Them off the planet and onto a secret and not commonly-known planet outside the gravitational field, while everybody else gets compressed denser than a lead brick.

Then there will be the deniers who, just for openers, will deny the Great Gravitational Squish to Come, because the Bible doesn’t say it’s going to happen that way. 

Or because they have a team of learned scientists with bought-and-paid-for degrees from the Betsy DeVos For-Profit College of Advanced Knowledge, and both those guys say it’s not going to happen.

Or because at least fifteen people woke up this morning and called in to work to say they felt light-headed, which means they can’t possibly be getting heavier.

But junk robocalls

must and will continue!

One thing’s for certain. Until the phone system goes down the black hole for all eternity, the junk phone callers will still be at it. 

While I was writing this, I got two — yes two junk calls! — from the scam artists in India who call to tell you they’re very, very official, and they need to fix the viruses in your computer. I asked my first caller if he was from the U.S. Government. He didn't deny it.

Maybe he'll call Donald Trump's cell phone next. Tell him to hurry. I'm suddenly feeling very heavy.