p-3
Explanation
This comic shows aliens arriving on Earth to share their wisdom. An alien announces: "Earth scientists! We wish to share our wisdom with you. Do you have any questions about the nature of reality?" A scientist asks: "How do you determine truth?" The alien replies: "P must be less than 0.05." The scientist asks: "You mean 0.05?" and the alien confirms: "Yes, why?" The next panel shows a newspaper headline: "BILLIONS OF SCIENTIFIC PAPERS RETRACTED" with the subheadline about scientific papers being invalid. A caption at the bottom reads: "This is a special message brought to you by easily-bruised-ego news."
The joke is about the p-value threshold used in statistical hypothesis testing. In science, a result is conventionally considered "statistically significant" if its p-value is less than 0.05 (meaning there's less than a 5% chance the result occurred by random chance). The alien civilization uses the same threshold, which initially seems validating -- but the comic implies that the aliens' confirmation that 0.05 is the correct cutoff somehow causes billions of papers to be retracted. The humor targets the ongoing "replication crisis" in science, where many published studies have failed to replicate, partly because the p < 0.05 threshold is arguably too lenient and has led to widespread publication of false positives. The joke suggests that if an advanced alien civilization confirmed this was the right standard, it would paradoxically undermine rather than support existing research, exposing how much published science barely clears (or doesn't actually clear) even this relatively lax bar.