this post was submitted on 05 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
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Unlikely.
We are eventually going to hit a real limit on the number of humans this planet can support. Whether or not we'll get there, that's not really in question. When we'll reach that point, that's harder to say, could be 5000 years, but I'd bet it's closer to 500. At some point, relatively soon, we are going to need to start expanding into near space, the moon, earth orbit.
It would be the same for any intelligent species. They start their existence in relative equilibrium, until they start outperforming other species, they shape the world to fit their needs, they invent machines, medicine, and then they are no longer in equilibrium, their numbers are steadily increasing. Any intelligent species will eventually be more successful than their planet can support.
But if a star system were surrounded by a Dyson Swarm, millions or even billions of free floating habitats and space stations orbiting the star, that's actually something we could detect. We know that isn't happening all over the galaxy, because we actually probably wouldn't miss that.
The Malthusian Theory. Generally considered invalid these days.
I don't think that's accurate to say at all. If anything, our current climate crisis points out that there are potentially multiple ways that we are nearing population limits. Sure, we could move to cleaner energy and prevent population growth from impacting the planet, but we aren't doing that, not fast enough.
We keep using more and more land for farming, and that often means destroying existing habitats, which has a real ecological cost. We could prevent the destruction of more habitats with advances in vertical farming, but generally speaking, those methods require more energy and have larger carbon footprints.
And ultimately, even if agricultural techniques keep up, there are simply other limits. For instance, you can't just generate more energy forever. Even with a mastery of fusion power, making free energy out of water, at some point the generation and use of energy heats the planet too much directly. You don't reach that point until your generating energy for trillions of people, but that's a hard limit, boiling the planet is not an option.
I'm thinking when human populations reach excessive densities, some plague will come along and thin us out. We're probably in that zone already.