a-group-project

A seven-panel SMBC comic. An excited woman tells a man: "Stay! Oh my god! Listen! We're living in a virtual reality! None of this is real!" The man, unimpressed, replies, "But like... reality isn't so great. Why would anyone make a whole virtuality that's just okay?" The woman explains that this reality is a university assignment for colossal beings, a group project for four of them but only one did any actual work. She says that's why there are lots of planets but few intelligences, why quantum uncertainty appears when you look too closely, and why the rules for getting into heaven seem arbitrary and cobbled together. The Age of Miracles, she says, was the one good being trying to plug holes in reality right before the assignment was due. The man, dawning with existential dread, asks, "So... everything I will ever experience... everything I could ever experience is..." The woman finishes: "A C+." Votey: a grinning man's head cheerfully shouts in a speech bubble, "We passed!" The joke: existence is a mediocre group-project grade, but the slacker beings are just relieved to scrape a passing mark.