2011-05-01
Explanation
This comic imagines what pranks would look like in a technologically advanced future. A group of friends at a party are laughing at one person, telling him: "Hahaha! The room you just went into was a centrifuge that accelerated you near light speed! Everyone you love has aged 70 years since we asked you to grab us some beers! Hahahaha!" The caption below reads: "Pranks are way better in the future."
The joke takes the concept of a harmless party prank (like sending someone on a fake errand) and escalates it to an absurd, devastating extreme using Einstein's theory of special relativity. Due to time dilation, a person traveling near the speed of light would experience time much more slowly than those in a stationary frame of reference. So while the victim thought he was just grabbing beers for a few minutes, decades passed for everyone else. The "prank" has effectively destroyed his entire life and relationships, which his friends find hilarious.
The votey adds a darkly comic coda: one of the now-elderly friends casually mentions "Also, we're enslaved by machines now," suggesting that in addition to the time dilation prank, a robot apocalypse occurred during those 70 years. The humor comes from treating both a life-ruining relativistic prank and machine enslavement with the same casual, party-going nonchalance.