XKCD Isn't Funny - #1476 - CERES

I made a song called "Ceres" once. You won't hear it, because it was made back in my Brainwave days and it sucks, but I made it.

Now, this is one of those comics that I'm out of the loop on. I didn't know what Dawn was, I didn't know Ceres had a white dot, and I didn't know what "inspected by no. 6" meant.

The first two things I can more or less infer from the comic, Dawn is a space probe of some kind, and Ceres's white dot has been bothering scientists for a while, so that's fine. However, I checked the forums and the wiki, and there are other people who don't have a clue about no. 6 either.

When I found out what it was (an example of a quality control sticker used by American clothing manufacturers) my reaction was more or less "Oh, that's it?". Like, the joke is just that a white dot could technically be a white sticker, since we don't know what it is yet. It's just easy, it's cheap, it's something the reader can already do. I think the alt-text does a good job at expanding the joke, but I wish it had just been used as the actual final punchline.

Here's a list of things the white dot on Ceres could be:
1. a billion golf balls
2. a very large poker chip
3. an unusually shaped scrape I caused when I accidentally backed my car against it the other day
4. all the papers that children have lost before handing them in :(
5. the X-Naut moon base, but on Ceres instead of the moon
6. tons of maggots. just tons and tons of maggots. ewwwww.
7. in a plot twist, it's actually the white dot's evil twin
8. just completely by coincidence, it's perfectly flat terrain with no unusual cause to it
9. a cum shot
10. the endless supply of stuffing that the Build-A-Bear people use
11. the white void that is the setting for every XKCD
12. snow!!! no school tomorrow!
13. the whites of their eyes
14. a bunch of white people lol
15. paint. it was going to be a smiley face but some idiot forgot to get the black paint for the eyes and mouth
16. the cheese that was left over when they were done making the moon
17. a ghost :0 spooky
18. that stuff that a toilet's made out of
19. 1/4th the cocaine supply of the average politician HA, BURN!
20. a scar from a really bad burn, like the one above^
21. a gigantic heard of sheep, all baaing away
22. marshmallows and/or the (raw) trout fish
23. my ego
24. a single pencil, covered by thousands of miles of pure bone
25. the sand-like substance that they put in those plastic hourglasses you find in some board games