this post was submitted on 12 Jul 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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So a coal plant is sort of running on solar power? Sure it took millions of years and a few extinction events to make that coal, but it’s technically renewable, right?
If you could make the sun go boom in a supernova, nuclear power would be renewable too.
Yes it's converted and stored solar energy and it is renewable if you wait long enough but not on any reasonable timescales for human society. The sun isn't big enough to become a supernova but if it did I guess you could argue if you wait long enough the material would most likely form other stars a few times until the stellar era of the universe winds down which will happen with or without any beings extracting energy to perform work.
Yeah, it seems that the sun just isn't big enough for that sort of thing. As the universe is also expanding, the uranium we find in this system is probably locked in here until the heat death of the universe.
If you could expect the elemental cycle to continue forever, you could argue that the elements of nuclear waste would eventually end up in a star which would recycle them into new uranium. The expanding universe makes that highly unlikely, so even in extremely long time scales, nuclear power isn't really renewable at all.
If the big crunch hypothesis turns out to be true, there would be an infinite cycle of new universes, and that would make every element renewable in extremely long time scales. However, the ultimate fate of the universe isn't particularly clear at the moment, so who knows really. For the time being, I'll just assume that the heat death is the most likely outcome.
Yes in the long term there's no such thing as renewable energy since entropy always increases. It's a misnomer that only has meaning in small human timescales.
Yeah if the big crunch is accurate and the universe is eternally expanding and contracting then all energy is renewable. Although this is way way outside the scope most normally have in mind when speaking about renewable energy.