this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
462 points (98.1% liked)
Showerthoughts
33773 readers
921 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 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If I were The Aliens, I would've stopped coming here somewhere around 2013-2014. And I don't say this with any kind of undertone, I just feel we haven't developed in significant ways over the past decade. They most certainly haven't presented any social interest, so it's a study. They'd only need vertical slices every half century to a century or so.
My guess is that the Earth is a petting zoo for some aliens. The adult aliens could come here to see how weird and stupid we are, while their children would give us some bitcoins to see if we do anything funny. What if some conspiracy theories, like the flat earth nonsense was a prank pulled by one of the visiting aliens?
Now, now, let's give ourselves fair share of the credit, we're dumb enough to come up with Flat Earth on our own, tyvm!:)))
Starting the anti-vaccine conspiracy would have been too cruel. I think any young punk would be grounded for a century for pulling that off.
Instead, I’m pretty sure humans are the only species capable of such self destructive behavior and aliens can only gasp in horror as we throw ourselves into the fire.
Also, climate change denial … oh, that’s just next level stupidity. No need to bring the doomlaser here. This species will be done sooner or even sooner. Maybe try planting a smarter species here next time around?
Surely, if something/someone intentionally caused our existence, they must be pulling out clumps of hair at this point (or equivalent gestures).
Although... well, this is purely speculative and quite a bit philosophical, but I guess it all comes down to how they'd manage fear and greed. I initially wanted to say that viciousness seems to be a facile trait for sentience, but I only have us as a sample, so...
I genuinely don't even know what to think anymore. My sense of scale and value has been completely shattered by our contemporary debasement with Fascism and burning the planet and everything in between and around, not in a million years could I have believed humanity in general could be so stupid as to do the same horrid shit all over again, and especially not after our forerunners' fervency in purging the very concept of Fascism. Hell, maybe it was just Marketing...
I mean, how can anyone consider a governing system so unabashedly inimical to life as a feasible way of doing things?! I... I just don't understand it. I don't know if I'm too stupid, or too naïve, or cloistered, or whatever the fuck else, but I just cannot process the idea of anything which looks like me behaving in such a horrid manner. I can grasp that capacity for violence, because I have it, too, but to use it in such a manner? No. That's where my system hangs.
Maybe humans are an experiment to see what happens if you combine infinite greed and selfishness in the same species. Sounds like a recipe for a total disaster, but it could be interesting to watch how the whole thing implodes at some point.
My morbid tendencies are fascinated by the idea, but I, myself, can't help but feel like staring at an incoming tsunami crest.
Ever read Roadside Picnic?
Sounds like I should look into that.
It's my favourite take on a first contact story. I think you'd appreciate it.
That depends on your description of development. Socially, economically, etc we have reverted and are doing the same things that failed 100 years ago. But there have been breakthroughs elsewhere.
Cas9 gene editing through CRISPR has opened a ton of incredibly valuable medical options around that time. The same with mRNA vaccination breakthroughs leading into the COVID era.
But mRNA isn't new. It just got the recognition with COVID. They used to burn could you imagine if they released the vaccine and it had a burning sensation.
These are noteworthy and relevant breakthroughs, yes, but I don't see us doing anything dramatic with this technology in less than a decade, maybe two. And that's just for something like regrowing teeth, way longer timeline for anything fancier. We're still just basically optimising old tech right now. New battery designs incoming, solar panel tech is getting better (slowly), we are moving, yes. But it's like watching people paint the living room at this point, and I assume long-distance space travel still isn't "cheap" for them, even with their fancy manoeuvering.
or they decide to enslave humans.
Tbh, if you're advanced enough to have a working Alcubierre drive, slavery seems like it would be a waste of resources.
Honestly, I don't think anyone in their right mind would risk it! We're certifiably insane when in large masses, we'd ruin their civilisation if they'd get us all.
We'd deffo see Bezos/Musk/Zuck/etc. becoming the Breens of our timeline, and we already hate'em!
Edit: plus, why bother? It's enough to cause a Pandemic, we're aces at making things worse by ourselves! Planet cleans itself up, move in, adapt existing infrastructure, no risk of random nukes... sounds like a good deal to me!
i was thinking GOAULD, aside from a couple of the system lords(Osiris an YU evil as she was her lore in the show was wanting humans to literate , while her brother was seth was against it), most of them had impoverished slaves, ra even banned reading and writing, sound familiar to prevent the slaves turning against him on another planet.
Good point, I guess it would be back to considering the permanence of The Cave allegory. I still have that gut feeling that humanity has a sort of in-built desire for freedom and self-determination which exists somewhere beyond the conceptual, something innate. Maybe its materialisation just takes a long enough timeline and that the species is offered relative stability in terms of genetics/psychological development (i.e. they don't just outright lobotomise us and turn us into Servitors, or smth...)
Or they took it as an opportunity to advance our technology enough to entertain us and stunt our growth. It's like giving monkeys an endless supply of bananas, why would the monkeys do anything else any more? They got all the bananas and there's nothing more to do for them.
It's an easy way to get rid of competition or an emerging civilization in the galactic neighborhood. Just throw us a bone and we'll gnaw on it for a few thousand years.
They'd need to come back and plant something else, because the side-effect of shortening attention spans has also increased the frequency at which we require new flavours of brainrot. I think this method of doing things is somewhat ineffectual.
Honestly, if I were to guess how someone would stunt us, is to "help" us improve our industry before we even grasp its implications. It essentially created Baron-Gods (and we sure do like triangles and shit!) while ensuring that we'll choke ourselves out.