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Title text: Cosmologists estimate the spaghetti strand to be about 200 septillion calories, though it could be higher depending on the nutritional value of dark matter.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a COSMIC SPAGHETTI BOWL - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.

In less than 5 billion years into the future, the Andromeda Galaxy is expected to collide with the Milky Way. This comic suggests this will happen when both galaxies get into a kissing distance after having slurped the same cosmic spaghetti strand.

This is a spoof of a famous scene in the movie Lady and the Tramp, where the titular dogs are eating spaghetti in an Italian restaurant. They happen to be eating the same strand from opposite ends, so they end up meeting in the middle and kissing. This scene has been mentioned before in 2612: Lightsabers.

It's possible that this is also a reference to Pastafarianism, the spoof religion which claims that the universe might have been created by a "flying spaghetti monster". If both galaxies are eating one of the deity's "noodly appendages" they may be guilty of blasphemy.

The title text figure of 200 septillion (2×10²⁶) calories for the Milky Way-Andromeda noodle equates to approximately 2500 calories per foot of noodle. This value makes sense only if Randall is referring to the physics/chemistry "small" calorie (= 4.184 joules) rather than the dietary "large" calorie (= 4184 joules). Dietary calories would be the usual usage in a food-related context like this one, but Randall was trained as a physicist and apparently used the small calorie here. Having 2.5 dietary calories per foot is roughly correct for a noodle size between thin spaghetti and angel hair pasta.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[Left galaxy:] Sluuurp

[Right galaxy:] Sluuurp

[Caption below the panel:]

Astronomers have determined that the Milky Way and Andromeda are currently slurping up the same strand of cosmic spaghetti, suggesting that in 5 billion years they will likely kiss.

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