2013-03-31
Explanation
This comic presents a satirical future history of humanity's downfall, driven entirely by the internet's obsession with cats. It begins with the premise that "the big money on the internet was in cats," and traces a logical escalation: cats led to the discovery that kittens are even more profitable, which led to dwarf cats, then dwarf kittens, then "hyperdwarf newborn kittens." A new branch of miniaturization technology became highly profitable, eventually producing "a kitten the width of a single human hair."
The cat photo industry kept demanding ever-smaller kitties, so scientists determined that the essential features of a cat are whiskers, meows, and purring, and created atomic-scale machines with tendrils, sound waves, and vibrations. But a problem emerged: at the quantum scale, too many "Planck-kittens" near each other caused their "purr frequency" to shred local space-time. The obvious solution would be to stop making them, but as one character points out, that would require convincing the internet to stop looking at cats -- which is declared impossible. The comic ends in the far future with aliens finding Earth's remains and remarking, "Another civilization that co-evolved with cats," followed by "There is no God."
The comic is a brilliant reductio ad absurdum of internet cat culture, extrapolating the demand for cute cat content to its apocalyptic logical conclusion. It parodies humanity's inability to resist short-term gratification even when facing existential risk, and the final alien panel suggests this is a recurring pattern across civilizations -- cats are a universal Great Filter. The votey shows a tiny kitten with enormous, adorable eyes, as if to say: yes, even knowing all this, you'd still want one.