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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Or:
We're to primitive to interact with due to missing some critical technology. Like how primitive tribes today would have no idea what radio communication and electricity are, there might be messages flying all around us from alien civs, but we can't detect them, and they aren't looking for the radio radiation we put out.
We already know of several critical events that needed to happen for life like us to be here: (short list) the rise of oxygen forcing life to adapt to using it as fuel; a slow deforestation giving time for our ancestors to descend from trees and adapt to living only on the ground, and whatever happened that led to the rise of highly intelligent neanderthalis, denisovand and sapiens apes after a million years of erectus without much change. We know something serious happened, just not what.
There is also filters in front of us. Getting over our addiction to petrochemicals looks to be one, it looks increasingly like internet overreliance might be another. Death of the host star or galactic mergers are things too.
Space is too big to visit in person. Civs exist and persist, but everything is too far apart, FTL either remains fantasy or is so prodigiously expensive it is not worth it on us.
Tied to 2 and 3, civs exist, but are too far apart and don't last long enough to detect one another. E.g. to get our first radio signals across just our galaxy would be tens of thousands of years. There are billions of galaxies. The earth will be swallowed and die by the sun when the first waves get roughly a third of the way to a far as we can see.