this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
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The universe is vast. The assumption that any species could travel to another is a flawed one.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
And even if they could, it's hard to imagine a reason to travel to another star system.
The expansion of a species beyond a single star system for any reason is dubious, there's really just no reason to do it, and the cost is extremely high (given known physics).
I say there's no reason to leave the solar system, but I think that probably needs some explanation, because the obvious reason that may come to mind is probably overpopulation on earth and looking for other habitable planets. The thing is, in order to travel to another star system you need to really master surviving in space; if you can build a colony ship, you can build space habitats. But if you can build space habitats, then you have enough material and energy right here in the Sol system to support quadrillions of humans living in space habitats. In other words, there's no reason to leave for tens of thousands of years.
All that is to say, if you aren't traveling to other star systems for your own species, you probably aren't doing it for others.
If we built a self replicating probe and sent it to the nearest system, and from there it sent off 2 more probes and so on, in 2 million years they'd have reached every system. The only cost would be the initial probe. and any species that has mastered it's own star system could do that. They could send out their own genetic material and spread their form of live.
They don't have to go themselves out into space, they can send automated machines. We've already started doing just that with very basic machines for scientific curiosity. I see no reason why we wouldn't send out replicating probes when we have the technology to do it.
However we do come back to Fermi's Paradox: the universe is 13800million years old. So far we have no evidence a probe has reached our star system. Where are they? Maybe we just haven't stumbled across one yet. Or maybe life really is very rare?
There could be multiple alien probes in our star System now and we would not know it. Space, even in our star System, is huge and probes are, most likely, small. We have huge problems locating, finding and tracking all the asteroids in our star system and we are still not sure if we have found all the planets, why should we be able to locate a alien probe?
how does it self replicate though? I guess it can guarantee finding solar power, but how does it find and process the materials it needs when it reaches the next star
Well there are actually some pretty convincing explanations for for the Fermi Paradox. The one I like most is that despite the 13800 million years, we're pretty early for complex life, and we may just be the first technological civilization in the Milky Way.
The theory goes that while there are a lot of older stars out there, there aren't a lot of 3rd generation stars. When some stars get to the end of their life, they collapse and then go supernova, leaving behind a dust cloud in which other stars can then form. Here's the thing, many heavy elements are only produced through nuclear fusion during a supernova. (Basically everything heavier than iron, about 3/4 of the periodic table). So that second generation of stars contain more heavy elements within the star. When the second generation goes supernova, more heavy elements are created.
Life exists on earth thanks to all of the complex chemical reactions that can take place on earth. But all that may only be possible because we're a 3rd generation solar system with all our fancy heavy elements, and 3rd Gen star systems are relatively new, we're quite early on the scene.
So because of that, we're certainly an early civilization, and we might be... the first.