Space Typography
And over heeee[...]eeeere (i)s Saturn.
And over heeee[...]eeeere (i)s Saturn.
This is another one of Randall's Tips, this time a space tip, the first of two in a row, the second being 2864: Compact Graphs with a design tip.
Randall has created a sentence with the property wherein, when printed in Times New Roman font, the distances of the "i" letters from the first letter are proportional to the radii of the orbits of the innermost five planets in the Solar System. These are the only letters in the sentence that have a dot over the letter (there are no "j"s in the sentence) or elsewhere (there are no periods, colons, semicolons, or other dot-containing symbols). He suggests that if you get lost traveling among these planets, you can use the dots as a map.
This won't actually be a very useful map. When traveling between planets, it's not enough to know where the planet's orbit is, you also need to know where it is along the orbit. Additionally, if you are truly lost then you likely do not know where you actually are, and which 'way' you are heading, though you can probably at least locate the sun if you are indeed within our inner solar system.
The sentence is self-referential, since it talks about using typography to measure distances in space, and this makes it a useful mnemonic. The "optimistic" in the sentence could indicate that the aliens in question are highly optimistic that this kind of "map" would be useful for navigating a star system where planets orbit in ellipses, rather than being in static positions along a line (as is so often depicted in line-ups of the Solar System's planets).
The title text appends the sentence with a section for identifying Saturn. It contains an ellipsis in brackets, which normally signifies that an indeterminate number of 'e's has been omitted from the sentence, seemingly to represent Saturn's large orbital radius as the next "i" in "is". The trick is that actually appending the sentence literally, brackets and all, after the original sentence (so that we get "Optimistic aliens measure space typographically. And over heeee[...]eeeere (i)s Saturn.") actually puts the dot on the last "i" at Saturn's orbit. The extra dots and periods beside the six 'i's only serve as punctuation and spacing; the parentheses, besides spacing, call attention to the 'i' in the title text, where the black emphasis of the comic is not available. They're also reminiscent of Saturn's rings, although they are much too large and off-center.
Similar sentences with varying numbers of "e"s could be used to continue out to any planet or other body which does not contain the letter "i" – which is all of the remaining planets and minor planets, with the exception of Eris. However, the strings of "e"s would get longer and longer, to the point that it might be necessary to write down how many of them are to be used – about 59 "e"s for Saturn, starting from the Sun – which negates any mnemonic value the sentence may have had and might as well just be replaced with a table of orbital ephemerides.