out
Explanation
This comic imagines a far-future scenario on Mars where a scientist presents the "Out of Ass-ica Hypothesis" -- a play on the "Out of Africa" hypothesis, which is the widely accepted scientific model that modern humans originated in Africa and spread from there. In the comic, a Martian academic explains that the bacterium which colonized and dominated Mars can be traced back to a single human gut, pushed out of an airlock on March 5, 2063. The punchline is that Mars has become "a vast macrocosm of one man's colon."
The joke operates on multiple levels. First, there is the scatological wordplay: "Out of Ass-ica" mirrors "Out of Africa," replacing the cradle of human civilization with a person's rear end. The diagram on the presentation even resembles a cross-section of a colon, rendered in the style of a serious academic poster. Second, the caption at the bottom -- "I plan to be remembered as the greatest colonizer of Mars" -- adds a layer of irony, as the speaker's grand ambition of Mars colonization would be achieved not through heroic exploration, but through accidentally seeding the planet with gut bacteria expelled through an airlock. The humor also gently satirizes the grandiose rhetoric around Mars colonization (a la Elon Musk), deflating it to a literal biological colonization by intestinal microbes.