Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic imagines a scenario in which aliens have captured humans and are trying to breed them in captivity, similar to how zoos breed endangered species. The joke plays on the idea that human courtship and reproduction are absurdly complicated when viewed from an outside perspective. The aliens explain the elaborate steps required: convincing the female that the male is trustworthy (by ghostwriting emotional letters for him), convincing the male that the female has desirable physical attributes (accomplished "through the use of photons," i.e., simply letting him see her), and then using relativistic time dilation to age the baby past the most vulnerable years to reduce the "murder rate."

The punchline comes in the final panel, where the aliens' success with humans is contrasted with their failure to breed bonobos -- a species famous for being extraordinarily promiscuous and easy to breed. The irony is that bonobos, unlike humans, apparently require love to mate in the aliens' captivity, inverting the real-world situation where bonobos are far less selective about mating than humans. The comic satirizes both the complexity of human relationships and the trope of aliens studying human behavior as if we were lab specimens.