2009-11-23
Explanation
This comic imagines a post-apocalyptic scenario where aliens have killed almost everyone on Earth, and the only survivors are foul-mouthed New Jersey thugs. In the first panel, three survivors survey the devastation and realize they need to rebuild everything: politics, philosophy, science. The second panel jumps forward 500 years, showing a lecture hall where a scientist is asked how much mass a neutron has. The answer: "0.000000013 metric f--ktons."
The joke is about how the entire system of measurement and scientific language would be shaped by the culture of its founders. If the only people left to rebuild civilization were stereotypical crude New Jersey tough guys, then even the most precise scientific measurements would end up using profanity-based units. The humor comes from the absurd collision of rigorous scientific precision (measuring a neutron's mass to many decimal places) with the comically vulgar unit of measurement.
The votey panel takes this further by showing a "Conversion Table" that reads: "1 metric fuck-ton = .8988 English fuck-tonnes = 1.4 Nautical fuck-tons." This is a parody of real-world measurement system confusion (metric vs. imperial vs. nautical), suggesting that even in this profanity-based measurement system, humanity would still manage to create multiple incompatible standards -- just as we have done with real units of measurement.