this post was submitted on 07 Jul 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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But that's the thing though. How can you determine the Earth as a reference point without knowing how it relates to other objects in space? "Here" is as useful a coordinated system as a fake absolute positioning system. "Here" is just your relation to other objects. If you don't know what your relation to those objects is you can't determine where "here" is, or the Earth for that matter. Whether it's the machine or the person operating it, something or someone has to calculate where the Earth is in order to use it as a reference point.
If you are driving away from your friend at 20 mph, from your perspective they are moving away from you at 20 mph while you are the one that's stationary. The only thing determining your location, or reference point, is your relation to each other.
You're still thinking in a context where the earth is travelling around the sun, etc etc.
If you assume the Earth as the reference point, then that is fixed, absolutely frozen, doesn't move at all. That's point zero.
You cannot calculate where the earth is. What you do is calculate where everything else, the universe itself and even other dimensions, are with regards to your fixed point.
This can feel counterintuitive, but here's a random visualization: https://youtube.com/shorts/UZyuZVvCE78
Note that, in that video, only the perspective has changed. The solar system is moving as usual.
This is also demonstrated well in the show Travelers with T.E.L.L.
Basically, a quantum AI from the future uses historical records to determine the time, elevation, latitude and longitude to send people back. Obviously the Earth itself is the reference point being used.
It was a seriously underrated show.
That video is super, super wrong, and nowhere even close to "just a different perspective". To demonstrate, Mercury and Venus should periodically come between the Sun and Earth, but that'll never happen in that model.
But that's the point that I'm trying to make. It's probably my fault as I'm not very good at explaining things like this, and I'm not disagreeing with at all. I'm just saying that there is no way to have a machine or method of travel with a fixed point without knowing its relation to other objects. Just like you can't know the trajectory of the Earth through space without knowing its relation to other objects. What I'm saying is that regardless of your "fixed point" you will have to do the same math, just in a different order depending on your point of reference. We are dealing with relatively here so the only variable that changes is your point of reference while the math stays the same.