this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
390 points (96.0% liked)
Showerthoughts
42899 readers
686 users here now
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.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I can point to examples of many civilizational collapses based on comparatively minor climate abnormalities in the last mere 7,000 years, and can say with certainty the earth has gone at least 5,000,000,000 without being bombarded by even one gamma ray burst.
I think any alien civilization with basic math would prioritize the bird-in-hand.
Civilization collapsing doesn't equal to species end. A gamma ray burst or yeah something that has already happened in the planets past, a big enough asteroid hitting us. Can mean the end of the species.
Of course civilizations collapse should be avoided even just for the reason of avoiding lots of people dying. We shouldn't completely discard expanding into space either. Our population and civilization is big enough that both things can be done at the same time.
Working towards both will probably provide a better overall goal for common people as well instead of currently working just to line the pockets of CEOs and pedofiles.
At this point civilization collapse would effectively terrestrially lock us in. There aren't enough easily accessible raw materials to reindustrialize to a space-faring point.
Yep.
If you burn through all the readily available energy resources, civilization collapses, then tries to rebuild itself...
It can't. Their ancestors kicked over the ladder of progress, and broke it.
Attempt 2 at civilization now has to figure out another tech tree, because they cannot cost effectively lubricate an industrial economy and logistics with fossil fuel.
Not strictly impossible, per se, but they have an even more difficult task.
You can point to those civilizations because their collapse was not the end, life continued on. We haven't been hit by a gamma ray burst or any other complex life ending disaster since we are here to discuss the scenario. But that's no guarantee that we won't be.
The odds of anything happening to render Earth totally uninhabitable are very small... in our lifetimes. But as long as we keep existing, the time frame will keep growing, the opportunities for disaster will keep accumulating and the odds will keep multiplying. The basic math looks very different when you multiply by infinity. Even the sun won't last forever.
Obviously, this is no reason to neglect Earth and rush to other planets. But it is reason enough to reject the idea that we should never spread to other worlds because Earth will always be enough.
you wouldn't know that. deep-sea life would probably survive any gamma ray burst, i guess.
and it turns out, there's a surprising amount of deep-sea life: bacteria and complex life.
on this diagram, it would throw us back by 300 mio. years max.
Won't ocean acidification kill a lot of that life? Isn't it already?