inoculate
Explanation
The Joke
Two aliens are observing a warm, wet planet that appears to be an ideal candidate for developing human life. One alien suggests they should inoculate it with a "small, weak band of humans." The method they describe — the humans will "harmlessly multiply" while the planet develops a "fever response" that fights off the infection — is a direct inversion of how vaccines work, except here, the "infection" being fought off is humanity itself.
The punchline comes in the final panel, where one alien questions whether the planet "didn't buy these things when roasted," implying that planet Earth has already undergone this process and was essentially "vaccinated" against humans — but the vaccine didn't work, since humans have thrived rather than being eliminated. The roasted planet reference suggests global warming as the fever response that was supposed to eliminate the human "infection."
The Humor
The comic works by flipping the perspective: instead of humans using vaccines to protect themselves from disease, the comic frames humans as the disease that a planet needs protection from. This is a darkly environmentalist joke — the idea that from a planetary perspective, humanity is a pathogen. The vaccine metaphor is especially timely given the comic's publication date in May 2020, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic when vaccination was a dominant topic of public discourse. The additional layer of humor comes from the implication that Earth's climate change ("roasted") is the planet's immune response trying to rid itself of the human infection — a response that appears to be failing.
References
- Vaccination/Inoculation: The biological process of introducing a weakened pathogen to build immunity, here applied at a planetary scale with humans as the pathogen.
- Climate change: The "roasted" planet and "fever response" allude to global warming as a hypothetical planetary defense mechanism.
- Gaia hypothesis: The comic loosely plays on the idea that Earth functions as a self-regulating organism, a concept associated with James Lovelock's Gaia theory.