Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

you-suck

2017-03-31 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
you-suck
Votey panel for you-suck
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

The Joke

A woman proudly tells a child that she created a computer that says "You suck, Bobby" over and over. She then explains that the computer was sent to space on a collision course with the nearest black hole. When it encounters the event horizon, it will cease experiencing time relative to them, but in its own reference frame it will continue on. There it will remain, running its program until the end of the universe, as they and everything they know passes away into nothingness. The child gasps in awe and horror.

The final panel, labeled "Earlier...", reveals the origin of this elaborate cosmic revenge: a playground argument between two kids. One child says "You suck times infinity!" The other retorts "Nuh uh!" and the first insists "Yeah huh!" This is the childish dispute that apparently motivated an adult to build a computer and launch it into a black hole just to prove that Bobby does, in fact, suck -- times infinity.

The Humor

The comedy comes from the absurd escalation: a petty schoolyard insult ("You suck times infinity!") is taken literally and turned into a massive physics project. Rather than simply moving on from a childish argument, someone grew up, became a scientist, built a computer, and launched it toward a black hole specifically so that time dilation effects would cause the insult to persist for what is effectively an infinite duration. The joke plays on the idea of weaponizing advanced physics to win the most trivial of arguments.

There is also humor in the dramatic, almost poetic monologue the woman delivers about the heat death of the universe and the passage of all things into nothingness -- all in service of the message "You suck, Bobby." The gravitas of the speech is completely undermined by its petty purpose.

References

The comic references gravitational time dilation near a black hole, a prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity. As an object approaches the event horizon of a black hole, time for that object slows down relative to a distant observer. From the falling object's own reference frame, time proceeds normally, but from an outside perspective, the object appears to freeze at the event horizon and never actually cross it. The comic plays on the idea that a computer at the event horizon would, from an external perspective, run its program for an effectively infinite amount of time. The title text references hypercomputation, a theoretical concept involving computation that goes beyond what a standard Turing machine can achieve, sometimes discussed in the context of exotic spacetime geometries.

View History (1) Original Comic
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