Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Free Will

2021-09-29 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
Free Will
Votey panel for Free Will
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic features a person praying to God about free will, asking if humans truly have it. God confirms that humans do have free will, but delivers the catch: humans are actually the only creatures in the universe that possess it, and this comes with severe cosmic isolation.

God explains that the rest of the universe is expanding away from Earth so fast that humans will never reach another star, never break certain physical barriers, and never have access to the substance that allows faster-than-light travel used by other civilizations. The "funny thing" is that humans got free will precisely because they are stuck in a cosmic backwater -- free will was essentially a consolation prize for being trapped in an unreachable pocket of the universe.

The joke deepens with the analogy to a restaurant: humans have free will the same way someone at a restaurant can "choose" from a menu, but there is not enough variety of options to make the choice meaningful. In the votey panel, God adds that "humanity doesn't matter" but then follows up with "that's good," suggesting that insignificance is actually liberating. The comic satirizes both theological concepts of free will and the Fermi Paradox, suggesting a darkly comic reason why we appear to be alone in the universe.

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