WASHINGTON – Normally, I’m not an alarmist, but today I’m making an exception — because by any measure it’s clearly time to panic, stockpile foodstuffs, withdraw your money from the bank, dig a moat around your house and fill it will something flammable.

What’s the calamity on the horizon, you ask? Could it be a meteor hurtling toward Earth, its imminent impact poised to raise a dust cloud which will block out the sun? Perhaps another ruinous economic crash is forthcoming, threatening to collapse markets and kill jobs?

No, what’s coming is much worse — and if you’re a part of the porn industry, much closer to home. The new threat is nothing other than exploding online pornography.

I know it sounds unlikely, but apparently a study conducted by someone who drew the notice of Huffington Post Canada indicates online porn is “to explode in the next 5 years.”

As a general rule, I never read past the headline on sites like HuffPo, because I have more important things to do, like tracking the nefarious, world-dominating actions of the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Bilderberg Group and a small group of bearded Reptilian aliens who have surreptitiously infiltrated reality television programming in recent years. This is obviously a very important story, however, so I took the time to skim the HuffPo article before diving into researching this issue through my own sources.

Apparently, a (possibly mad) scientist named “Dr. Jupiter” has conducted research revealing a new phenomenon called “internet climate change,” which is characterized by a global rise in web temperatures, the creation of increasingly irritating “emojis” and a depth of public angst the likes of which we haven’t seen since the cancellation of HBO’s Deadwood.

I’m not sure exactly how the physics of it all works (or how the physics of anything else works, for that matter), but by what I gather from quickly reading up on digital explosives, a chain reaction will begin when Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman try to stream the same Pornhub video at the same time while sitting in luxury trailers located on movie sets on opposite sides of the globe — sets that were unwittingly built on two potent energy grid points discussed in well-documented and universally accepted academic works like Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods?

From there, propelled by a rare element made up by an obscure sci-fi author many years ago and later flagrantly cribbed by James Cameron for one of his crappy-but-very-expensive films, the initial explosion will spread from tube to tube like cyber wildfire, instantly vaporizing fans of the “oiled up” category on PornEskimo, along with their desktops and/or mobile devices.

By the time the fireball reaches RedTube, half of the world’s porn surfers already will be cooked to a crisp, while the other half will endure no less than second-degree burns from their stomachs to their kneecaps, or from their foreheads to their fingertips, depending on the orientation and angle of incline of their office chairs at the moment.

While the situation is dire, another scientist (played by Dennis Quaid) has assured me “there is still time.”

“If the politicians, especially the bespectacled and balding one who is quite transparently based on Dick Cheney, will wake up and change their ways, we can stop this online porn supernova,” the scientist, whose name still hasn’t been finalized, said. “But I fear the evil industrialist — who we’re hoping will be portrayed by Brian Cox — has already bought off everyone who can make a difference, so we might be stuck waiting for some sort of inane, deus ex machina-style Hollywood script mechanism to reveal itself and save the day in a way that is as cliché as it is scientifically implausible.”

Meanwhile, a visibly frazzled and world-weary conspiracy theorist named Charles Vystraha (Gene Hackman) tells me the Great Porn Fire of 2020 won’t be caused by some celebrity-driven simultaneous porn-access fluke, but by intentional acts of digital barbarism originating in the White House itself.

“People have no idea how deep this thing goes,” said Vystraha, clutching a tattered manila folder filled with seemingly random newspaper clippings. “It all started with something called Operation Hardwoods and the military’s experiments with using hardcore porn for mind control. The project was later taken over by the CIA, who expanded the program to develop weaponized porn to be used on the Afghan front during the jihad against the Soviet army — and later domestically, when they targeted Charlie Sheen for reasons unknown.”

I can’t guarantee if you read the HuffPo article it will make the same claims, but I can guarantee I’m right — or at least I’m no more wrong than HuffPo and the actual explanations offered by Dr. Jupiter or Hanover Research or Passover Incorporated or whatever it’s/they’re called.

Doubtlessly, skeptics will argue online porn can’t explode, and I’m sure they’ll have some kind of “science” at their disposal to explain why this is so. Others will say my carefully considered claims herein actually represent nothing but a “paranoid delusion.”

That’s OK. I don’t mind being called paranoid, so long as people keep in mind the old saying: Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean there aren’t bearded Reptilian aliens working with General Motors (and possibly Jimmy Kimmel) to steal the fillings from your teeth in order to build a space station from which they will dominate the universe — or at the very least, substantially increase their galactic market share.