de-extinction
Explanation
The Joke
Scientists excitedly announce they have brought back the dinosaurs through de-extinction. When they discuss how to monetize this achievement, one suggests a "Dinosaur theme park?" but the other dismisses it as "too complicated." The final panel reveals their actual solution: a newspaper ad reading "Scientists Offer: For $20,000,000,000 you can be the reason dinosaurs went extinct."
The comic takes the Jurassic Park premise -- scientists resurrect dinosaurs and then try to profit from them -- and subverts it completely. Instead of building a theme park (the obvious and famously disastrous fictional approach), the scientists find a far more creative revenue stream: selling billionaires the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to personally cause a mass extinction event. The joke implies there are people wealthy and ego-driven enough to pay twenty billion dollars for the bragging rights of having wiped out an entire species.
The Humor
The humor operates on the absurd but oddly plausible premise that the ultra-wealthy would find "being the reason dinosaurs went extinct" more appealing than simply viewing them in a park. It satirizes both the excesses of billionaire vanity projects and the cynicism of scientific monetization. The dismissal of the theme park idea as "too complicated" is a winking reference to the Jurassic Park franchise, where that approach famously went catastrophically wrong -- making the scientists' alternative seem almost pragmatic by comparison.
References
- Jurassic Park: The 1993 Steven Spielberg film (based on Michael Crichton's novel) about a dinosaur theme park that goes horribly wrong, which is directly referenced and dismissed as "too complicated."
- De-extinction: The real scientific concept of using genetic engineering to bring back extinct species, which has been seriously discussed for woolly mammoths and passenger pigeons.