Hey scientists, I get it. It’s pretty exciting when you find a (roughly) Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of another star for the first time. But when you make claims like “the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent” before we have any data about the atmosphere or the presence of water or anything like that, you come off as rather silly. It seems especially silly now that it’s being questioned whether Gleise 581G even really exists; that’s gotta bring the odds of life there down to at least 95%.
Also OMG it’s a new comic for the first time like forever yaaaaay!
I follow Stewart and Cohen in saying when they get all excited about Gleise and places like that, its really just a sign that they are thinking with the blinkers on – and assuming they have to find Earth to find life. Screw Mars, I want a mission to Europa!
Hah! Is people moving from Facebook to Twitter ubiquitous on Earth too?!!! If not you’re reasoning has failed!
(And I’ve yet to get Facebook or Twitter… I’m still in the middle ages…)
DapperAnarchist, sounds good to me!
Canuovea, it’s ubiquitous among advanced Earthlings.
Yay! New post!
Boo! Long time to next post!
There’s this webcomic called Turbosloth that is total crap, you may have seen it if you clicked on one of its misleading text-only ads that say things like “it’s XKCD for stupid people” when, you know, that’s actually XKCD itself… but you have to click through to see if it there’s something worth it behind the ad. I mean, someone would have to have something of worth behind an ad that they are paying to display, right? Well, no. Finding out that you just clicked a Turbosloth ad is like stepping in runny dog crap, it is never pleasant, and you have to take the time to get it off.
Anyway I guess the moral of the story is that if you see a snarky text only ad for a mystery comic you shouldn’t click it, because you will probably just get Turbosloth. Or this comic.
Are advanced Earthlings ubiquitous on Earth? If not, how can you be sure there are and advanced alien equivalent?
Who knows Emil, maybe there will be more new posts soon (unless there aren’t).
Canuovea, I only meant it as a conditional claim. IF the Aliens are advanced, then they will certainly have moved to Twitter, as evidenced by the ubiquitousness of that move among advanced Earthlings.
Bah: I guess I really owe you an apology for your having to spend 10 seconds reading a comic you didn’t like. I don’t know what I was thinking. Accept this plea for forgiveness from the very bottom of my heart, and may God have mercy on my soul.
Hello! I was so excited to see my rss comic feed update, it has been a while! As for that planet, I kinda thought the same thing but figured the plan was to send half our people there. That’d be nice, I’d like an emptier earth…. Would you go or stay? I’m sure they need philosophers there. Think about all the advantages, no more twin earth experiments! Instead we can talk shit about Gleiseins instead, claim they don’t know the difference between water and gwater then make fun of them when their ostensive acts point to stuff in our world not theirs. I’m sure they’d probably do the same, but we won’t care, everyone knows twin earthlin..err…Gleiseins are all zombies despite their fancy molecule for molecule identity claims. WAIT! Unless you’re going there? Cofess! Will you be a Gleisein??
No, not cofess. No one will cofess.
Perhaps I am already a Gleisein!
(but you didn’t hear that here)
What are you talking about, of course there’s life. They found giant snails in the oceans using an infraspectral graphing telescope. My friend read all about it in the news!
bah! I feel I have been misled by having to spend more then ten seconds reading a comment that concluded with a failed attempt at a clever punchline.
I think the whole debacle is a good sign of how awesome science reporting in the media works today: “Scientist says a 100% chance of life on newly discovered planet” … apart from the fact that it is very little like earth (tidal lock, three times the mass, has to survive regular bursts from the star (a red dwarf, and those are notoriously unstable), no indication of atmosphere and so on).
If it even exists. It hasn’t been observed, and its existence has only been calculated. The paper was rejected from top-tier journals on the grounds that the calculations were unconvincing (and the premises wrong) before it was published in a relatively low-tier journal (it is less than clear, to put it mildly, that the errors were corrected before the resubmitment).
Reality sucks
Ok. You’ve already covered that above. Sorry. Why isn’t Amercanloons among your “Awesome Sites”?
Liosis, what! So we can reasonably conclude that there are giant snails that drive cars and use Facebook and/or Twitter. Amazing!
G.D., I have no idea how I made such an oversight, but I’ll fix it right away.
so i spent all day reading your comics yesterday, and now i am having trouble writing my history paper, because i am feeling very relative when it comes to condemning hitler.
This should probably go in the section about people stating that philosophy is dead… but I found this interesting essay about morality without God (and it’s science), and as I read between the lines it seems to be saying what was said here earlier about the usefulness of philosophy (though they call it spirituality, or whatnot). Quite interesting. Anyway, here, check it out if interested. It is on the New York Times, but I don’t know if thats a good or bad thing…
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/morals-without-god/
i like your sense of humor in the comics