this post was submitted on 13 Oct 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
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The human population would have to be in the tens of thousands for that to be likely, and I'm not sure it was ever so low unless we're arguing about technicalities regarding who counts as human during the process of evolution.
70,000 BCE humans nearly went extinct apparently. Some think less than 1300 individuals at the lowest.
Yes, humanity was very close to extinction and sub 10,000 in population at one point. We can tell from mitochondrial DNA.
Damn, what a powerhouse.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487
It's been significantly lower than 10,000 at least once in history.
Unfortunately there's a paywall to the article but the free abstract gives you the critical information. And this is among some of the most up to date research on the topic
I read the full paper and I'm not qualified to evaluate the validity of the model being proposed but I find the idea that the population was
rather implausible. Implausible things sometimes turn out to be true but models frequently turn out to be wrong so if I were to bet, I would bet on the latter.
Plus, for the purpose of the OP, I think neanderthals and other close relatives of modern humans should count as people even if they have no living descendants.
There's other recent research that counters this idea. It's still uncertain. Humans have dipped low before, just probably not levels rivals animals like the cheetah, otherwise we'd show the same genetic issues they have due to the inbreeding of the survivors.
I don't have a reference to it at the moment, so it's a "trust me" scenario, but what I found then was through googling (because I used to be convinced of the bottleneck), so it's out there.
From my understanding of the subject the current consensus is the bottleneck did happen. There's been fluctuations in the exact number, but under 5,000 is what is most widely supported by the evidence.
The only debate I'm aware of is the exact timing and cause of the bottle neck. It was widely believed a volcano eruption was responsible, but that has become more discredited. It appears the population decline occurred before the eruption and took a significant amount of time to climb after the eruption.
If I recall right (and it may not be right lol) it was timing as well as how many other populations there were. I think the initial discovery and research made some assumptions that what they found was the only people around and that it was a sudden disaster. Just like now we think that the dinosaurs were already suffering for various reasons and the asteroid was just a final push towards extinction over time.
This is a statistic problem. It is likely to occur at least once per year with a population below 250,000.
Age is distributed and we're only looking for one day, with a day being no well defined so we have to assume any given 24 hour period.
If it was under 10,000 there could be entire weeks without a single death.
This is based on the chance of any random person dying being 1:50,000.
This is today's rate and in the past most people died young but the chance of it occurring does not require the population be lower than that chance of a random person dying because we're looking for any day not a specific day.
You're right in general, but 1:50,000 implies an average lifespan of 137 years, unless I'm missing something. I think 1:15,000 is a more reasonable estimate.