the-science-is-unsettled
Explanation
The Joke
The comic is titled "Funtime Activity: Thinking of ways well-established theories could be proven false." It presents three panels, each showing an absurd scenario in which a well-known scientific theory could theoretically be disproven, but in a way that would be incredibly inconvenient or unsettling rather than enlightening.
The first panel addresses evolution: "We can never tell the creationists" -- implying that even if scientists found evidence against evolution, the social consequences of telling creationists they were right would be too awful to bear. The second panel deals with the second law of thermodynamics: a person complains that their room keeps spontaneously cleaning itself and they can never find where they put anything -- a reversal of entropy where disorder decreases on its own. The third panel shows a Lovecraftian scenario for linguistic relativity: an alien entity declares "We come from the stars! We call... we brought a thousand civilizations to tell you that it is pronounced 'jif.'"
The Humor
The humor in each panel comes from imagining what it would actually look like if a well-established scientific principle were violated -- and it turns out the result would be annoying, embarrassing, or horrifying rather than triumphant. The evolution panel jokes that science would have to cover up the truth to avoid giving creationists a victory. The thermodynamics panel turns the second law of thermodynamics violation into a mundane housekeeping annoyance. The linguistics panel settles the eternal GIF pronunciation debate by having cosmic horrors confirm the answer -- a deliberately anticlimactic use of incomprehensible alien contact.
The comic also satirizes the phrase "the science is unsettled," which is often used by science skeptics to cast doubt on well-established findings. Weinersmith flips it by imagining scenarios where the science genuinely is unsettled, but the results are absurd rather than validating skeptics.
References
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy (disorder) in a closed system tends to increase over time. The linguistic relativity hypothesis (also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) proposes that the language we speak influences how we think. The GIF pronunciation debate refers to the ongoing argument over whether the Graphics Interchange Format should be pronounced with a hard "g" or a soft "g" (like "jif"). Steve Wilhite, the creator of the format, has stated that the intended pronunciation is "jif," but the hard "g" pronunciation remains widely used.