SMBC Comics Forum

Maze1125 wrote:Okay, I think I understand this comic, here's my idea:

You're doing it wrong.

"Don't exterminate all the aliens you encounter." Maybe the intended audience for this comic is the Daleks.
I don't think they have any concept of humor anyway.

It's not an allegory for the folly of mutually assured destruction?

Okay, I think I understand this comic, here's my idea:

First panel:
This talks about a universe being created as a test, and the people in the panel are the usual gods, so the implication (as usual) is that the universe being created is ours. This leads to the joke of the speech in that panel "I wonder what it's like if karma is arbitrary." the implication being that for a "normal" universe karma is non-arbitrary, so good things happen to good people and bad to bad, whereas our universe was created as a test to, in part, see how life would react if things just happened, regardless of if you were good or not.

Second and third panels:
Here a language is being created so life forms can communicate, and the third panel shows numerical sequences so it's easy to infer that this language is being created out of mathematics.
But I don't believe that is what is actually being implied. I believe what the comic actually is going for is, given that our universe is the one being created, that the language being created is mathematics itself. The idea is that mathematics was created, for us, as a language.
This leads to the fourth panel...

Fourth panel:
Here it is said that the language was so universal that it allowed life to talk to non-life. The image it leaves in your mind (and the one actually shown in the comic) is that people can just shout at rockets to tell them what to do but, assuming my interpretation of the previous panels is right, what I think it actually means is that all our technology, which is all based on mathematics, is in fact an unintended by-product of the universal language that was created, and the image in the panel is what the gods who created the universe see as happening, as that have no concept of technology and they just see mathematics as a language (as that is what they created it for). So, when we design rockets, they see us talking to them with a universal language.

The last panels shows the usual mutually destructive war concept, which I feel the comic would have been stronger without.

So that's what I think.

anus mcgee wrote:THIS COMIC SUCKS

Linkara what are you doing here

THIS COMIC SUCKS

little known fact, daleks actually represent the Nazis

Oh, everyone knew that? Okay whatever

dauntless wrote:A bit preachy, but that's par for the course. Would have been nice if it ended with a joke instead of whatever that last panel is trying to say.

"Don't exterminate all the aliens you encounter." Maybe the intended audience for this comic is the Daleks.
I don't think they have any concept of humor anyway.

BUT WHAT DID IT MEAN

maybe it meant nothing, maybe that's the point

THAT'S A SHIT POINT

i'm willing to concede that

A bit preachy, but that's par for the course. Would have been nice if it ended with a joke instead of whatever that last panel is trying to say.

Guest wrote:I liked it. It felt deep.

That's what she said.

*KLAXON*

Obviously the comic was deliberately nonsensical.

I liked it. It felt deep.

The karma bit doesn't really mean anything. It's basically the equivalent to a programmer going 'I wonder what happens if I set X to 10' or 'What happens to the universe if E = mc^3?'

If anyone didn't identify all of them, the number sequences are the Natural numbers, the Prime numbers, the Square numbers and the Fibonacci Sequence

First, I have a problem with the entire concept. But that's really secondary.

My main problem is I have no idea what the first panel has to do with anything. I don't know where a discussion of karma even fits into the rest of the comic. And I don't understand how arbitrary karma can be called karma at all.