negligible

A single-panel comic set on a platform beside a tall white space-elevator cable. A man in a white shirt, red tie, and brown pants gestures in panic and begins to run, shouting, "Wait... wait... you just assumed the cable mass was negligible?" and then "Run! Run!" Beside him a calm woman in a red top, gray skirt, and glasses replies, "It's a tradition." A tiny "niip" sound effect floats near the cable. The caption below reads: "It was a mistake to let physicists engineer the space elevator." The joke: physicists' habit of approximating away inconvenient terms (here, the cable's mass) has doomed the structure. Votey: a close-up of the same woman, now wide-eyed and panicked, saying, "I have just enough time to draw a free body diagram before we perish!"