this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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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
- 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.
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A while ago a coworker and I had an idea for a sci-fi novel that was similar in idea to this.
Essentially humanity sent out these probes that were in effect giant mirrors (pointed at Earth) that reflected light information back to us. The further out they go, the further back in time we get images/video of. We never went anywhere with it, but I thought it would have been neat to explore what happens to immediate political tensions since hard evidence of more recent events, never seen before, would return to Earth first before we even found out the origin of our species.
2 questions:
How would the probes travel faster than the light information from way back when?
How high were you when you guys came up with this idea?
Who knows! It wasn't going to be hard sci-fi necessarily, but more food for thought. Not everything in sci-fi has proven scientific stuff behind it. They travel faster than light in Star Trek and Star Wars...
We weren't, and that's probably why we didn't question the idea too much 😅
I just spent ten minutes on Google trying and failing to find it, but there's a novel that uses that basic premise. Humans find this network of observation satellites and are able to tap into the feed and basically watch earth from the 1300's on. The builders are long since gone. Most of the novel is the crew trying to catch up to this museum ship that the network is uploading to.
Was a really good one if anyone knows the name of it.
Edit I found it!
If you do find the name, could you post it here please? It sounds like it could be good :)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/382161.Chindi
Awesome, thank you :)
You mention "the builders", and that brought me to this series. Ring a bell?
https://www.goodreads.com/series/41758-heritage-universe
I found it!! By Jack McDevitt
Awesome! Thanks for that, always adding new sci-fi to my library
Oh snap! That does sound eerily similar. Probably written before we had our idea, and I'm sure it is far more well written than what I could have done.
I'll keep my eyes open for it!