2012-07-24

A five-panel SMBC comic. Panel 1: A balding man in a green shirt, seen from behind, looks up at a bearded man standing at a wooden podium in a cloudy sky and says, "Heaven?! I must be dead! Will my wife be here?" The bearded man (a St. Peter figure) replies, "Nope." Panel 2: The bearded man explains, "You married a robot. Robots don't have souls. Frankly, the idea is laughable. A robot is a pointless mechanistic binary storage system." Panel 3: He continues, "A human being is a meaningful mechanistic quaternary information storage system" (a dig at DNA's four bases versus binary). Panel 4: The man, convinced, says, "Heh. Yeah. I guess you're right. She was just a machine." Panel 5: A red banner reads "Elsewhere..." In a dark robot afterlife, a robot asks, "I'm dead? Is my husband here?" A second robot at a podium scoffs, "The one made of meat? Are you serious?" The joke: both heavens dismiss the other species' kind as soulless. Votey: A close-up of the robot at the podium, a black-and-white sketch showing its single round glowing eye, exclaiming dismissively, "Bald meat!"