this post was submitted on 09 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
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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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Once you're able to use time as an information, they can send a message with a character limit. For every letter they need to wait:
Remaining Message Length^Alphabet Size*Index of Letter*time intervalSo, if future people want to sent the message
helloand our time unit is 1s, and the max message length is 5, they need to send the bit to exactly26^4*7+26^3*4+26^2*11+26^1*11+26^0*14= 3276872 seconds or 54614,5333min or 910,242222h or ~38 days after the start time.We can choose smaller time intervals, but with a long enough message, we'll eventually reach the year 3000 again. Alternatively, we can move the start time into the past, at the expense of quite a few possible messages.
This is the same problem as trying to map an n-dimensional array to a one dimensional array
Nah, "aaaaa", "bbbbb", and "zzzzz" doesn't need to be one of the "multiple choices"
Don't spell each letter of each word, just use words to "spell out" the sentence instead.
If you're not asking about anything that we currently don't have a word for, we can use words as the alphabet, sure.
We then need to transmit a list of words, they're allowed to use, otherwise our count is off, because I'm sure that 974 years from now english won't be the same, as it is today. They'll have a lot more skibid rizz than we do now.
use Chinese xD
logographic languages tend to last longer, especially now all the characters are digitized.
A "Computer" didn't exist in ancient times, but they still used words that have always existed to create new compound words: 电脑 ("Electric" + "Brain"). Airplanes didn't exist but they still came up with the word 飞机 ("Flying" + "Machine")
Wrong. Assuming 6bit encoding and one bit per minute; a 3 char start and stop sequence. 1024 character message could be sent per 4.3 days. Or a faster response time than my ex.
You can't send bits at a constant rate in this case. You essentialy get to send one very large number, the amount of time since your decided starting time (plus the one bit we were actually intended to use). The bit count grows logarithmicly with time
Thus, the amount of bits n you can send over t time steps would be
As an example, say they wait 8 seconds before sending you a 1. You have received the number 1000 and the bit 1. That's a total of 5 bits.
If they choose to wait twice as long, 16 seconds, they have in effect transmitted the numbers 10000 and one additional bit, a total of 6 bits. Double the time but only one additional bit.