The Last Molecule
The Last Molecule
[Ponytail is presenting on a stage. To the top-center of the slide which Ponytail is pointing to, there is a circled "100% complete" under "Chemistry", then to the left is "Biology" which is at "93% complete" and to the right is "Physics" which is at "98% complete". The bottom of the slide shows the structural formula of a molecule which is captioned "The Last One", along with a few smaller captions around it drawn as squiggles.]
Ponytail: With the discovery of the last molecule, I'm pleased to announce that chemistry is finally complete. Ponytail: Best of luck to our competitors in their race for second place.

This comic jokingly proposes a situation in which chemists have discovered and catalogued every single possible molecule. Thus they declare they have "completed chemistry."  As deep learning algorithms can now predict chemical properties of proteins in advance of measurement, this situation may be looming closer.
Like comic 2268 , this may be a reference to a quote from around 1900, often attributed to Lord Kelvin or Albert Michelson: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." More likely, this is a reference to attempts by Frege and by Russell and Whitehead a century ago to prove using symbolic logic the completeness of arithmetic. This turned out to be impossible since Kurt Goedel's famous Incompleteness Theorem proved that at least one proposition could neither be proved true or false. Against this background, the idea that natural sciences could be 90+% complete is humorously exaggerated.
In real life the number of ways to arrange atoms into molecules grows combinatorically with the number of atoms in a molecule. Since molecules can be extremely large (up until the point where gravity takes over and initiates nuclear fusion), the number of possible combinations is much much larger than the number of particles in the observable universe, making the full cataloging of all molecules impossible. Thus, a "final molecule" cannot be reached. In addition, chemistry is the study of the interaction and changing states of atoms and molecules, not simply the cataloging of all specimens of molecule. Even if we did have a list of every molecule, there are a far greater number of ways to continue studying them, so the field would still be nowhere near completed.
This is reminiscent of biology's focus in previous centuries on simply cataloging the species on Earth, or Mathematics' classification of finite simple groups (only the latter was, surprisingly, actually completed successfully).
Further, the goal of science is not to "complete" a field, but to understand it better and better (finite order group theory did not shutter its doors after all finite simple groups were classified).  No scientific field is considered fully understood (or rather, it is then considered a specialisation of a wider field). As readers are aware of this, part of the humor comes from the very high percentages given to the different fields. Putting Biology at 93% and Physics at 98% is patently absurd. Another part of the humor is the precision. As mentioned in the title text, we can't even give a definitive answer to changing-target yet deceptively simple questions like "How many kinds of ants are there?"
If biology were simply a matter of cataloging species, we are currently at around 10-20%. And yes many of them are ants; when J.B.S Haldane, founder of the field of population genetics, was asked what he learned about God from studying creation, he reportedly said "God is incredibly fond of beetles" . Counting species aside, fundamental and important problems such as what genes promote which traits, the nature of cognition, and the mechanism behind several diseases remain complete mysteries. We know less about our own ocean floor than we do about the surface of Mars.
As for Physics, all the elementary particles of the Standard Model of particle physics have been experimentally detected, culminating in the 2012 detection of the Higgs Boson . But questions such as "what is dark matter?", "how do we unify the four fundamental forces?", "how do we make nuclear fusion possible on earth?", "is the speed of light symmetrical?", and "how many dimensions does the universe have?" make it clear that the field still has a long, long way to go.
The title text in particular makes fun of Biology lagging behind due to the inherent difficulty of cataloging all species. Species are being constantly created and recategorized, so even if it were possible to know exactly what animals were alive on Earth at any one time, and which could interbreed, there would still be no agreement on the number of species they constituted, and that's without even getting into historic species, such as the contentious question of whether Neanderthals are considered a subspecies of homo sapiens, or a whole separate species.
[Ponytail is presenting on a stage. To the top-center of the slide which Ponytail is pointing to, there is a circled "100% complete" under "Chemistry", then to the left is "Biology" which is at "93% complete" and to the right is "Physics" which is at "98% complete". The bottom of the slide shows the structural formula of a molecule which is captioned "The Last One", along with a few smaller captions around it drawn as squiggles.]
Ponytail: With the discovery of the last molecule, I'm pleased to announce that chemistry is finally complete. Ponytail: Best of luck to our competitors in their race for second place.
