Main Page
Welcome to the explain xkcd wiki! We already have 12 comic explanations!
(But there are still 3253 to go. Come and add yours!)
Latest comic
| Asteroid Threat |
 Title text: Paleontologists have long worried that the dinosaurs blasted into space 66 million years ago will one day complete their orbits and fall back down. |
Explanation
It's generally agreed by scientists that most dinosaurs went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub asteroid impacting the Earth near the Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago, either directly or indirectly.(but it wasn’t just the asteroid, as there were several other factors involved in the mass extinction. And the world was already going through a mass extinction event when the asteroid struck, so it just accelerated the mass extinction.) This comic posits that another asteroid is soon going to hit the Earth again. Because the impact location will be on the exact opposite side of the planet (the antipode), the comic takes the absurd notion that because it will act the 'opposite' way, it reverses all the original effects and bringing dinosaurs back from extinction, which is absurd.[citation needed]
The general consensus is that the dinosaurs went extinct as a result of the environmental effects of the impact, those that weren't in the immediate vicinity of the impact itself, but the title text (in a possibly separate treatment) suggests that it actually launched the dinosaurs alive into space, thus circling the Sun in a long orbit that will some day intersect with the Earth again and, absurdly, they will land still alive. Which is ridiculous, as not only would they have to somehow survive the initial impact (apparently strong enough to have knocked them into space), then survive the airless vacuum of space, survived all the way to the present day and then their presumably meteoric return to the Earth's surface - a thoroughly impossible feat. But the comic acts as if they are going to be able to land back on the Earth and take control again.
Because Earth rocks have been found on the Moon, there has been some speculation that microscopic fragments of fossils from the era of dinosaurs or earlier may have landed on the moon, but no such fragments have been collected.
Transcript
- [Two images of Earth are shown. At the top left is a small one, centered on southern West Africa, showing the Atlantic Ocean and the east coast of South America, with a dotted line through the Earth entering at the Yucatán Peninsula and exiting at the east-central Indian Ocean. Taking up most of the rest of the panel is a large Earth image centered on the Indian Ocean and containing a target symbol, comprising a circle and four spokes, aimed at a location in the east-central Indian Ocean.]
- [Caption below image:]
- Dire news: An asteroid is on course to hit the earth exactly opposite the Yucatán Peninsula, bringing back the dinosaurs.
New here?
Feel free to sign up for an account and contribute to the explain xkcd wiki! We need explanations for comics, characters, themes, memes and everything in between. If it is referenced in an xkcd web comic, it should be here.
- If you're new to wikis like this, take a look at these help pages describing how to navigate the wiki, and how to edit pages.
- Discussion about various parts of the wiki is going on at Explain XKCD:Community portal. Share your 2¢!
- List of all comics contains a complete table of all xkcd comics so far and the corresponding explanations. The red links (like this) are missing explanations. Feel free to help out by creating them!
Rules
Don't be a jerk. There are a lot of comics that don't have set in stone explanations, feel free to put multiple interpretations in the wiki page for each comic.
If you want to talk about a specific comic, use its discussion page.
Please only submit material directly related to—and helping everyone better understand—xkcd... and of course only submit material that can legally be posted (and freely edited.) Off-topic or other inappropriate content is subject to removal or modification at admin discretion, and users posting such are at risk of being blocked.
If you need assistance from an admin, feel free to leave a message on their personal discussion page. The list of admins is here.
Logo
Explain xkcd logo courtesy of User:Alek2407.
