2020-07-27 On homogeneity of cultures in the Sombrero Galaxy

It’s come to our attention that some of you have been worrying that our claim to be giving you news from “the Sombrero Galaxy”, as if we spoke for everyone in the galaxy, was going to get us into trouble.

Obviously there are billions of different cultures here. We plan to tell you about all of them, and how they relate to each other. Mostly they know about each other, and so mostly they have some stuff in common. That’s not the problem.

What was worrying some of you (we just found out) was the possibility that there might be cultures here that we COULDN’T tell you about because they’re inside our central black hole, where we can’t see what they’re doing.

For those of you who didn’t know, the Sombrero Galaxy has an unusually big, unusually low-density central black hole. We’re rather proud of it.

The definition of a black hole is something you can’t get yourself out of, once you’ve gotten yourself into it. (I mean a physical thing. A bad marriage doesn’t count.) And you can’t send information out of it either. We don’t know any way round this. I mean, your physics is basically shit but, as we mentioned last time, one thing you seem to have got more or less right is the limits imposed by the relativistic structure of spacetime.

Stars and planets fall into our black hole regularly (about one solar system a year, give or take). And when we say that the place they end up is low-density, we mean the average density inside is about the same as the density of your atmosphere on Earth. So there could in principle be places in there where folks could live.

We’re pleased to be able to tell you that there’s no-one there, though.

Anyone finding themselves in danger of falling into the black hole in recent times just, duh, gets out of the way.

But you need rather good transport mechanisms to do that. Space ships and stuffs. So what about before we had them?

Well, fortunately, the region around the black hole has ALWAYS been very hot, even before there were stars and planets to fall into it. (This is because the black hole formed out of contracting gas when the Sombrero Galaxy was brand new.) It’s also always been subject to brutal tidal forces, especially at the beginning.

So everyone who got pulled in, in the early days, died a horrible fiery death.

So they’re not there any more.

So you can relax.

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