2012-09-05
Explanation
This comic is a math-based observation about the cumulative time savings of self-flushing toilets. It defines three variables: T (time saved per use of a self-flushing toilet, estimated at 0.5 seconds), P (the number of people with access to self-flushing toilets, estimated at 1.5 billion), and U (uses per day per user, estimated at 1.5). Multiplying these together, the comic calculates that self-flushing toilets save approximately 37 years of collective human time per day, or about 1,110 years per month.
The comic then presents a bar chart comparing "Time Saved Monthly by Toilet Efficiency" (an enormous bar representing 1,110 years) against "Your Maximum Lifespan" (a tiny bar). The humor comes from the absurd juxtaposition: the aggregate time saved by a minor bathroom convenience dwarfs any individual human life. It is a classic SMBC move of taking a mundane technological improvement and scaling it up to cosmic proportions to make a philosophical point about collective versus individual human experience.
The votey panel shows the cartoonist (Zach Weinersmith) thinking "There. Cynical poop joke fixes preachy optimistic comic," which is a meta-commentary on the comic itself. The main comic could be read as an optimistic celebration of how small efficiencies add up to save enormous amounts of human time, but Weinersmith undercuts this by acknowledging that he has deliberately framed it around toilets to keep the tone from getting too earnest or preachy.