Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A woman stands at an official podium and announces: "After consultation with the UN, NASA, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in view of the most recent similar calamity, we have resolved that everyone should evolve into birds." The caption below reads: "It was a mistake to put paleontologists in charge of the asteroid defense program."

The joke is that paleontologists, whose expertise is in studying ancient life (particularly dinosaurs), have a very specific frame of reference for dealing with asteroid impacts. The last major asteroid impact was the one that wiped out the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. The paleontologist's "solution" to the asteroid threat is therefore based on who survived that event: birds, which are the living descendants of dinosaurs. Rather than proposing a technological solution like deflecting the asteroid, the paleontologist proposes that humanity should simply "evolve into birds," since birds are the proof that evolving into a different form is a viable asteroid survival strategy.

The Humor

The humor works because of the absurd mismatch between the gravity of the situation (an incoming asteroid threatening all life on Earth) and the completely impractical solution offered. The paleontologist is applying their domain expertise in the most literal and useless way possible: they know that birds survived the last asteroid impact, so their plan is for humans to become birds. The phrase "everyone should evolve into birds" is especially funny because evolution is not a voluntary process and takes millions of years -- making it doubly useless as an emergency response plan. It satirizes the tendency to put the wrong experts in charge of problems, leading to solutions that are technically informed but practically absurd.

References

The comic references the Chicxulub asteroid impact approximately 66 million years ago, which caused the mass extinction event that killed the non-avian dinosaurs. Modern paleontology has established that birds are the direct descendants of theropod dinosaurs and were among the survivors of this extinction event.