Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A mother gives her young daughter a patch of the garden, telling her it is hers to do what she likes with. The daughter immediately asks for mineral rights. The mother casually agrees -- "I suppose?" -- not realizing the implications. The daughter then clarifies: she wants mineral rights extending as deep as she likes, all the way down to the core of the Earth, "in the shape of an enormous spike."

The daughter then reasons that the cone of her property spike should expand upward as well, granting her airspace rights. "Beyond the atmosphere, the cone grows ever larger as it penetrates the cosmos." Following this logic to its conclusion, she declares that at a great enough distance, stars and galaxies fall within her cone -- making millions of them, and all their inhabitants, her property. She demands that alien spacelords bow before "Sally the Child Empress." The mother, exhausted, asks what she actually plans to plant. The answer: "I like carrots."

The Humor

The comedy comes from the daughter applying rigorous geometric and legal reasoning to a simple gardening gift, extrapolating property rights from a small garden patch to dominion over the entire universe. The mother's increasingly alarmed expressions as she realizes she has inadvertently created a cosmic tyrant are priceless. The final punchline -- "I like carrots" -- brings everything crashing back to the mundane reality of a child who, despite her megalomania, is still just a little kid. It is a playful jab at how property law and mineral rights, taken to their logical extreme, produce absurd results, wrapped in the charming package of a child's unbounded imagination.