XKCD: It's more than a comic

I'm guessing it has to do with the...

Ya' know what, I'm not even going to guess. I'll just wait for someone smarter than me.

I'm guessing it loops back to panel 1 after the last one.

I think the joke is as soon as he pulls the lever, time reverses to right before he pulled the lever. It's like that machine that flips its own off switch when it's turned on.

Like this?

Precisely, only with time travel.

The alt-text implies that time is now flowing backward.

But then that's not just time travel anymore, that's outright time voodoo magic.

It doesn't say Time Travel Machine, it just says "Time Machine".

It didn't?

*checks*

Huh, you're right. I guess I must have assumed time travel on my own. That's what people usually mean when they talk about time machines.

The Alt Text implies that the machine makes time run backward, if you didn't get it from the comic itself. It's kind of a weak joke.

It time-reversed its own activation?

Then shouldn't it have automatically turned on again?

If time goes backwards, do you do things backwards too, or you act normally while everything else goes backwards?

There was an episode of Sliders where time flew backwards. It was very strange because everything appeared to happen normally, but the main events of the episode happened backwards. It really bugged me then, and it still bugs me when I think about it. This xkcd bugs me too.

Kinda like that one episode of Red Dwarf?

Man, it'd be hilarious if this comic impacted "Time" any.

Well, so long as time is reversed for everything, then all observers are time-reversed at the same moment. Thus, to any observers within the universe that got time-reversed, everything remains the same.

Heh, I thought the joke was that the machine forwarded time by the rate of 1 second per second.

You know, just progressing in time normally and then calling it a "time forwarding" or something.

Apparently the two guys in "Time" are going out into the sea to figure out why it's going up.

I guess Randall's trying to imply this isn't normal tidal forces.

I'm not sure what the implication is, but this world has no tides that we can observe, otherwise the water would be rising and falling naturally.

It's an artificial environment. They're on a colony ship or something.

They're in a webcomic.

Detail. It seems like this old joke reused. Anyway, it's also scary how well detailed Google Earth's view is.

At least he used three data points this time.

An electron microscope has an extremely short range, unfortunately — it isn't exactly capable of macroscopic observations, and I doubt we'll have surmounted fundamental laws of physics by 2031. The same goes for optics, where you're dealing with basic physical laws — modern imaging sensors are already exploiting quantum level effects to squeeze those millions of pixels into a tiny little device.

Now, storage continues to grow at geometric rates, and that remains the biggest obstacle to global mapping projects like Google's. So there's still a lot of room to improve.

Plotting things on a log scale is a bit disingenuous here, that's all I'm saying.

Storage growing is an obstacle to global mapping?

That's the joke.

No, storage capacity is an obstacle to global mapping; improving storage capacity (and bandwidth) will allow maps to become higher resolution. Imaging technology is another obstacle, of course, but there are physical limits to optical resolution.