Black holes: Not your ordinary life-sucking worry

            Thank goodness for old issues of National Geographic.

            The one on black holes came in particularly useful the other day.  About a month ago, my eight-your-old-prone-to-worrying-about-the-most-interesting-things-before-she-goes-to-bed daughter expressed concern about the sun dying out.  But not just the sun dying out – more the notion that it will turn into a black hole and suck the Earth into it.

            “What’s going to happen to all the people?” she asked.

            “Well,” I told her in my most calming fatherly voice, “That’s only going to happen five billion years from now, so you don’t have to worry.  Go to sleep.”

            “But what exactly happens when planets get sucked into a black hole?  Will it crush the people?”

            Realizing that this was turning into a spiraling worry that sucks all reason out of everything, much like a black hole itself, I reassured her, “Don’t worry, all the people will be gone by then.  They’ll be in heaven.”

            “But what about all the animals?”

            Darn those animals!  I decided to take a hard line tact: “When the sun burns out, all the animals will be dead anyway.”

            She wasn’t very impressed with my response, but it was enough to end the conversation.  I’m not sure if this is a tendency of girls, to worry on end, but I can’t recall being especially concerned as a boy about the end of the universe.  Nor can I remember worrying about dying in any circumstance, as I am much more prone to do today (a function of aging, perhaps?) 

Yes, I remember pondering why we exist.  I also remember arguing with my friend about what the Roughriders season record would be (9-9 was always a safe bet).

But my daughter has obtained a level of responsibility and maturity that I never reached.  And perhaps this is why she is prone to worrying about things that are beyond my sphere of understanding.

Perhaps it’s male simple-mindedness that provides some comfort to daughters who are developmentally beyond their male counterparts.

Of course mothers can offer comfort, too, and usually are much better at the consoling bit.  When our daughter hurts herself, it’s not me she runs to.

But in rare circumstances like these, it takes a father to dig up an old National Geographic he read a year ago on the topic of black holes.  It takes a father to delve so deeply into an article on the physics of gravity that he barely pays attention to his daughter’s math homework. 

“Is this right, Dad?”

“Uh-huh,” I respond, half-glancing at her page while learning about what would theoretically happen if you stood at the edge of a black hole.  (And this is incredibly interesting!  Standing at the cusp of a black hole, for every minute you experience, a thousand years would pass on Earth!  Yes, my friends, gravity influences time… unbelievable!)

But the real reason I was reading was to confirm that our sun is in fact too small a star to ever become a black hole.  Yes, it’s a puny little star compared to most of the giants out there.  And even if it did, apparently it wouldn’t suck the Earth into it (who discovers this stuff, anyway?)  Only if the Earth’s orbit somehow changed so it was on a collision course with the black hole would it be reduced to the size of a marble.

To my relief, my daughter found this quite reassuring. 

            I know this because a few days later she whispered into my ear at church, “I’m really glad the sun won’t turn into a black hole.”

            “Me, too,” I whispered back.  And I really meant it.