Xkcd: Meltdown and Spectre

The trolley problem is a classical ethical dilemma, where a loose trolley is torrenting down a track and heading for five people bound to the track.

You have the possibility to divert the trolley onto another track in time, but this would lead to the death of another person bound to the second track.

Regardless of why people are bound to those tracks in the first place, the question raised would be if it can ethically be justified to kill one person by action, instead of letting five die by inaction.

I guess I would interpret the analogy drawn in the comic strip to be describing speculation as "an accident waiting to happen that just normally gets averted at the last minute by design".