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:
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.
Maybe. But this would still only filter some.
The great filter to me is a vast mix of filters. Sime never leave their planets because they are oceanic only and forever, some because the gravity is too high to ever escape, some because they die out, others due to no genetic intrinsic motivation to expand at all, etc. There can by myriad possible filters all applying at the same time
The issue isn't just flying saucers not landing in downtown Manhattan, the problem is the universe has been silent so far for us. A universal tendency towards planetary protection doesn't explain why we don't see a cosmos awash in artificial electromagnetic signals. Everything we find seems to have a natural explanation. If life really was as common as it should be, we would see it broadcasting out into the dark like we are. The universe is old, big and filled with the stuff life needs. Life SHOULD exist, the fact that we haven't found any real evidence of it yet is bizarre. Some fundamental part of how we understand the universe is wrong.
That just indicates nobody is beaming an uncompressed signal directly at use. Something not on a tight beam directed at us would disperse and get lost in the noise. A compressed data stream would be indistinguishable from noise if since we don't know the compression algorithm and with any kind of interference at all there wouldn't be any way to distinguish it from noise.
Getting a radio signal basically requires there to be an alien race that knows we're here and wants to talk to us.
Yupp could be a whole species of beings out there with their own space programs trying to send and recievesignals but they're left in the dark just like us, forever out of reach and drifting further from each other.
We may be receiving weak signals all the time that come across as noise, but receiving a message is a different story with specific motivations and efforts behind it.
Or, perhaps, the "Great Filter" is just a question of "Can a species come together, or will greed of a person outweigh life of people?"
The ones who hoard all the resources destroy everything for everyone else.
Seems very plausible if other life is like our own.
If all it takes for a species to never leave their planet, is just a few bad eggs, then that would be a defining great filter. All life eventually develops idea of altruism (helping others without anything in return) but that makes egoism even more beneficial strategy, because egoistic individual will have much more resources and higher chance of survival than altruistic one.
Seems plausible.
Honesty we should just sell the moon to private equity
It would be worth it if Elon Musk would move there.
It's free real-estate!
"We need to spread to the stars to ensure the survival of our species."
Why? Why does our species need to survive? Why would anyone care about that? I don't think anyone really does. People just want to do cool stuff, as entertainment. To alleviate boredom. That's it.
No one reading this will "go to the stars". It's unlikely more than a handful will visit Mars in your lifetime. Why anyone would want to go to Mars is beyond me, it's extremely inhospitable to humans. There's nothing there.
We thought, after going to the moon we'd continue on in that vain, and have space hotels by 2001. It didn't happen, don't think anything will be different this time.
Stop thinking we can trash this planet, "but it's okay because we'll find a different one." That's not going to happen. It's far, far more likely we're going to kill ourselves off long before we can get anywhere close to doing that. That's the reality.
I agree with most points except not wanting the human race to survive.
I very much want the human race to survive but to do it in a way that isn't destructive to our planet. Which IS possible.
I think the great filter is more likely a hyper individualistic mindset that creates a "well I lived so why do I care if other lives after me?" Mindset.
You're line of thinking mixed with access to nuclear weapons destroys us all. And that's very likely what will end up happening.
We should all want humans to survive as long as possible BUT be working towards a way that we can do that without being destructive.
Ultimately though yes the end is certain as they say. Heat death of universe and all that (if that's even what happens, no physicist I know of has been consciously there when its happened and able to report back)
But yes. All life animals, plants, humans and otherwise should be kept alive it really is our duty as intelligent beings to facilitate that.
that makes us potentially a very stupid species
No thanks. Why blame humanity for the crimes of one person?
If you're upset that humanity doesn't punish this person, it's because we're trapped in a system of violent control. It's not because people are stupid, it's because we fear for our lives. Nobody wants to be murdered, locked in a box, etc. We're not going to end this system by calling ourselves stupid. That just further serves our masters.
Maybe that’s a filter? Any civilisation that lets itself get trapped in a system of violent control under fear of death gets wiped out by the worst of itself?
Where did the world's richest person get his money? What is money?
Why blame humanity for the crimes of one person?
It's not one person that needs to be held to account, dis-empowered, guillotined, reformed and stripped of their ill-gotten gains. It's an entire class of billionaire oligarchs, cabal of political/global elites and exploitative corporations.
Yeah at the very least learn how to be sustainable so they can use the time they have to live sustainably to advance tech to where its actually possible to move. I mean we have something like a billion years so 100mil should be a pretty safe bet sun wise. I mean we should do some space research but heck we even need to figure out how to sustainably use orbital space.
Notice how there is only one species that thinks of doing things like, sending shuttles into space.
Even if there is life, how likely do you think it would be for the exact type of intelligence that humans have, to emerge?
They then have to have more luck, and not die out. And we have no species to compare ourselves to, except the now extinct hominids, who are our cousins anyway.
On top of that, they died off.
Now how likely is it for a planet to even have that?
We're talking about nearly infinite planets, but also an infinite timeline, so while life, even life very similar to ours is likely among those numbers, that it exists at the same time as us and close enough to make contact is just very unlikely unless they are technologically advanced way beyond us and have overcome those factors, in which case they surely could make contact, but seeing the apex predators of this planet behave the way we do, they'd likely feel like we're too far below their intelligence and keep their distance, especially with the fucking morons we keep making rich and famous while calling them "leaders".
nearly infinite
lol come on now. There's finite and infinite. There's no such thing as "nearly infinite".
There is when the finite number is so large that it's almost irrelevant that it's a finite number. "An incomprehensible large number", better?
Meanwhile I believe time is actually infinite in the sense that I believe the big bang was part of a cycle of entropy and then concentration that has happened and will happen forever. It's just a belief though, and about as spiritual as I get.
Nah. They invent generative AI and their civilizational progress stalls forever.
They (we) become Wall-E human style characters.
And I guess the AI never actually becomes advanced enough to explore the cosmos itself? Otherwise that would be the alien life we run into, right?
So they get addicted to AI, but it's only marginally better than our shit AI. lmao great.
I refuse to believe that capitalism is the terminal emergent quality of life in the unuverse.
I refuse to believe as much for humanity.
"it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism"
This seems backwards to me, since the latest variant of what we call Humans is the only species on this planet, that - to the best of my knowledge - ever attempted (a) leaving it and (b) destroying their own habitable climate (along with that of a large portion of all other species) on the planet.
in my humble opinion (a) Is the marvel of international science collaboration, probably one of the highest achievements of this species, (b) on the other hand is fueled by greed and incompetence in equal quantities and according to Hanlons razor, we shouldn't equate this to malice, even though it comes very easily to members of our species.
a) is true, but b) is not true. There have been mass extinction events in the past that have been caused by a new species evolving. Things got pretty crazy when tree bark came onto the scene. Or maybe the opposite of crazy because a lot of things died off.
Say hello to my little friend, the bacteria! And a loooong line of his cousins, reaching the rabbits and beyond.
Yeah, at least normally resources are depleted by the number of organisms, not the greed of a few examples, but this is not a new thing.
maybe the real treasures are the natural resources we destroy along the way!