Monday, August 06, 2007

There goes the neighborhood.


Dear friends and readers, it is not often that I make mistakes. When I do, I pride myself on being able to do the right thing: act like I planned it all along.

I once made the claim that the coolest possible thing in the universe was the collision of two black holes. I was wrong, but for a very interesting reason. There are... in the universe...these things called Galaxies. I'm sure you've heard of them. In all likelihood, you live in one, or at least vacation in one.

The one I call home is called the Milky Way, named after the popular candy bar.

Far away--about 5 billion light-years....really, really, amazingly, flabbergastingly far away, in other words--four galaxies are currently colliding. Or...were colliding...about...er...5 billion years ago.

Yeah.

Crazy.

You can say it. Don't be ashamed. That's probably the coolest thing that could ever happen. Ever. Four galaxies crashing into each other. Together they are a mass ten times the size of our galaxy. Can you imagine the cataclysm? The carnage?

Imagine if you actually live
d in CL0958+4702 about 5 billion years ago. The show would be amazing. Look up into the night sky and see a spectacular, pestilential, cataclysm beyond biblical proportions. Entire galaxies crashing into each other. There isn't a metaphor or analogy strong enough to compare it to because there's no event in all the fucking cosmos that even begins to compare to this spectacle!

The Milky Way crashing into Andromeda, in about 3 billion years or so, will be nothing, a fender-bender, a boring nothingth of a nothing on the Kuha Significance Scale TM. It's a shame, too.

It's exhausting to contemplate. Entire civilizations may have been destroyed. Populated planets decimated. Whole cultures wiped out with no one to mourn their loss.

Well, someone here mourns them. Someone sheds a single tear for all those amazing civilizations that got to die in the most momentous cosmic even in the history of the universe! You know who mourns them? I do, motherfuckers. I do.

5 comments:

Puuda Maggui said...

I shall mourn for them by recording a song for them on the world's smallest recorder! Then, I will record that song and send it through satellite in their direction in the hopes that their alien souls and alien vaporized remains hear it in about 5 billion years from now!

Dr Kuha said...

That would be like 10 billion years after they were destroyed.

I suppose I should clarify one little thing. It's actually somewhat unlikely that so much damage was done. In all likelihood, relatively few actual collisions probably took place, since galaxies are so massive, and yet mostly empty space. So they would really sort of pass through each other, wobble back and forth a bit, and then eventually stabilize and become a really huge galaxy.

The one really cool thing would be the central black holes of the four galaxies merging! That would be crazy.

Anonymous said...

Well, if that's the case...then it's really not that amazing at all. I mean, come on, you really had me hooked with this entire "death and devastation" thing, and now come to find out, that it was all a hoax, a trickster trick by none other then the lokian type person that you are, so that you could get off on my utter humilitation in finding that I had believed a lie! The audacity! How dare you! I bite my thumb at thee sir! Good day to you.

Dr Kuha said...

Oh, come on. Don't be like that. At the very least, it makes for an amazing fantasy.

Is it really so much less amazing without all the death and destruction?

Anonymous said...

Okay, you managed to convince me. I'll give it a shot, but if this too, is some sort of illusion, I'm not snuggling with you anymore.