2011-10-21
Explanation
This comic tells a science-fiction story about cryogenic preservation. The narration explains that the first cryogenic patients were frozen too slowly, causing ice crystals to form and rupture too many cells for them to ever be revived. However, several centuries later, cell-repairing nanobots were circulated into their bodies, located the ruptures, and knitted the cells back together, leaving properly frozen bodies awaiting treatment.
When the patients are finally reinvigorated, they find the situation "somewhat distressing." A confused patient asks a doctor: "So... was I alive or dead?" The doctor explains the patient was "a corpse before we had the right tools, and a patient after." The patient protests: "How can my being alive or dead depend on the level of technological advancement?" The doctor coolly responds: "Look, I'''m a doctor. You'''re all corpses until proven otherwise."
The comic then takes a darkly comic turn: "Fortunately, there was a simple emotionally satisfying solution" -- a product called "Topical Anti-Existentialism Cream," applied two times a day. When a patient asks what happens if they still despair over "the infinite lacuna between what I hoped life was and what the evidence suggests," the answer is simply: "Three" (times a day). The joke brilliantly captures the genuine philosophical problem that cryonics raises -- whether death is a binary state or merely a function of current medical capability -- and then deflates it by suggesting that existential crises can be treated with a topical cream, satirizing our tendency to seek quick fixes for profound philosophical problems.
The votey shows the bald doctor exclaiming "It works!" -- suggesting the anti-existentialism cream is genuinely effective, which is itself an absurd and funny resolution.