Russell's Teapot
Russell's Teapot
[Cueball is standing in front of a blueprint labeled "CubeSat-Based Design", containing a satellite with a teapot in the top.]
[Caption below the panel:] I'm crowdfunding a project to launch a teapot into orbit around the sun to settle the Russell thing once and for all.

Russell's Teapot is a philosophical argument that reflects on the difficulty of trying to prove a negative. It involves a hypothetical teapot orbiting a heavenly body, whose existence hasn't been proven, and states that it cannot be disproven (somebody put it there secretly?). While an instrument could be theoretically engineered to pick out a teapot-sized object of any luminosity, the teapot would be very easy to confuse for other pieces of space debris, and the space to search is extremely large; the task is thus akin to the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack.
Bertrand Russell devised this analogy "to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others." As such, Russell's teapot is very often used in atheistic arguments.
Cueball is trying to settle the teapot argument by actually launching a teapot into space via a crowdfunding campaign. This misses the point of Russell's argument, which is about unfalsifiable claims in rhetoric and not a literal teapot.
" CubeSat -based design" refers to a type of miniaturized satellites that is made up of 10-centimeter cube units (here seemingly consisting of 3 units) and enables cost-effective means for getting a payload into orbit.
The title-text refers to Russell's paradox , also formulated by Bertrand Russell. Russell's paradox was a flaw found in naïve set theory where one could consider "the set of all sets that do not contain themselves" (a "set" is a mathematical term for a "group of things" -- "things" in this case including a set itself). The paradox arises with whether this set, in turn, contains itself: if it does, then it cannot; if it doesn't, then it must. Similarly, like in the barber paradox , the vehicle which launches only vehicles which do not launch themselves is impossible: if the vehicle takes off, it must launch itself as well as the teapot, and thus can never be launched (without violating alleged NASA regulations, at least). That said, he might get around those regulations by using an initial first stage with an offboard power source for the moment of launch, for example a laser striking a parabolic mirror and massively heating air beneath the craft, causing expansion, or a compressed gas cold launch system such as used to clear submarine launched missiles from their tubes before the real rocket motor ignites.
The barber paradox can be stated as follows: "Consider a town in which a man, the barber, shaves precisely those men who do not shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself?" Either answer, yes or no, leads to a contradiction. Sometimes the paradox is incorrectly stated, replacing "precisely those" with "only". Under that scenario, there is no paradox; the barber is merely unkempt.
There is, however, a solution in this case. Instead of launching itself, the teapot-containing vehicle may be fired from a space gun , catapult, or other launcher, and then boost itself the rest of the way. This, while true for the CubeSats themselves, is not true for their carrier.
Randall has talked about CubeSats in later comics as well, specifically in 1992: SafetySat and 2148: Cubesat Launch .
From the top right, clockwise.
[Cueball is standing in front of a blueprint labeled "CubeSat-Based Design", containing a satellite with a teapot in the top.]
[Caption below the panel:] I'm crowdfunding a project to launch a teapot into orbit around the sun to settle the Russell thing once and for all.
