2010-10-18
Explanation
This comic is titled with two escalating labels: "Scary" and "Really Scary," exploring the unsettling nature of death from increasingly reductive scientific perspectives.
In the first panel, labeled "Scary," a doctor stands at a patient's bedside and explains that there isn't really a good definition of death. She notes that we could say "end of consciousness is death," but consciousness doesn't have a strict location in the brain. This is scary because it suggests the boundary between life and death is fuzzy and poorly understood -- we can't even precisely define when someone has died.
The second panel, labeled "Really Scary," zooms in to the subatomic level. Two protons that were apparently part of the now-deceased woman are talking to each other. One asks, "Hey, proton #1217243865291... did the woman we were in just die?" The other responds, "What's 'die'? Hey, you wanna go be part of a rock?" and the first answers "Yes." This is "really scary" because at the fundamental level of matter, the particles that make up a person have no concept of life, death, or identity whatsoever. They are completely indifferent to the existence of the organism they composed and will simply go on to form other objects.
The votey panel takes it one step further to "Really Really Scary" with someone asking a wavefunction where it is, and the wavefunction answering "Everywhere. Maybe." This adds quantum mechanical uncertainty to the existential horror -- at the deepest level of reality, even the location and state of matter itself is fundamentally indeterminate.