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
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- 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
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
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.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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What?
You're literally ruling out the most likely scenario:
Like, there could be a planet on the exact same level as us, thinking the same thing about aliens. But if they're 1,000 light years away, all the know about Earth is it has water. Something they might not even consider relative in the search for life if they don't need water.
And even if they wanted to send us a signal and could figure out where to send it, best case scenario we get it in a thousand years and they have to wait at least two for a response they'd have no idea if we'd be capable of sending back.
Even if every planet tried to contact the first 10 planets with life they find, eventually the novelty would wear off and they wouldn't keep wasting all the resources just to add another tally 2k years from now to the list of planets with life.
Everyone gets hung up on aliens wanting to interact with us, because we want aliens.
If an alien civilization is advanced to know about us, they don't give a fuck about us. And they wouldn't, except if they're planning on such long timelines that their procedure for finding life is to just steer a couple giant asteroids at us.
A civilization capable of noticing us, just wouldn't have anything to gain from interacting with us.
There are billions of areas in the universe that are millions of years older than us. Considering the amount we've advanced in the last 125 years, it seems likely some of them would be space travelors by now.
You just said:
And:
Logically, you understand that with two vastly different times scales over that much distance...
The chances of overlap is infinitly small?
Maybe they passed by before our solar system even formed. Maybe after our sun burns out they stroll by.
But why would they choose to spend their time wandering around in a spaceship anyways?
Even if they had instant travel making distance and time absolutely meaningless. If life is so plentiful and there's so many that are that advanced, exponentially more at our level, and innumerable planets supporting more basic forms of life...
Why would they care about us?
We're one in trillions to them.
Quick edit:
Back to the point, in that scenario we'd never be "no contact" because they wouldn't care.
Any one planet wouldnt even be a rounding error.
We wouldn't be one of the few they want to study. We'd be one of a huge number