this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
390 points (96.0% liked)
Showerthoughts
42899 readers
620 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
Well, in a few million years the sun will burn out, and we won't have any choice but to migrate.
*billion
Not quite an immediate concern tho. Maybe for aliens, too?
what makes you think that waiting makes spaceflight easier?
Technology development is related to time. I feel like that sounds sarcastic, but I don’t mean it to be.
If we approached deep space flight anew in three hundred years after working on non internal combustion engines for other purposes in that time, we’d probably be much better able to reduce the total emissions from space flight than if we work on it continuously for the next hundred years, even if we reach zero emissions in a shorter timeframe that way.
The same is true for material sciences and trying to figure out how to reduce the level of metallic ions released into the ozone layer by spacecrafts. Hell, we’ll probably have more advanced international cooperation in three hundred years and language education/translation software, giving us a better ability to respond to an emergency in space.
i doubt that. the basic physics behind rocketry is well-understood. we know why electric propulsion cannot be used for lift-off (rocket equation), nuclear-thermal propulsion induces its own problems (nuclear waste), etc.
there's just no way that you're gonna circumvent the ways that physical laws push you into, even if we wait 300 years.
I don’t think it’s possible to know now that there won’t be significant developments in the next three hundred years. Tech savvy people in 1726 would have been looking at this, which I don’t think would give them enough information to make any useful predictions about how jet propulsion works.
Even the idea that non-ICE means electric- maybe in three hundred years, we’ll be have a new type of engine. Or maybe more likely, we’ll have a type of fuel that doesn’t pollute and it will be an ICE, just without emissions. Or maybe nuclear waste will be a solved problem.
We can’t know, but we do know that space flight is currently super pollutant, and continuing to launch rockets at the rate we have been is unsustainable.