As always, there is a relevant xkcd for this: https://xkcd.com/2608/
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 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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I was going to say one of them should have been 50 times removed but Randall got me in the alt text:
Grandma says that because of differences in primate and feline lifespans, the cat is actually my 17,000,000th cousin 14,000,000 times removed.
Where do fungi fit in?
Nobody knows.
A lot looks like we and champignons share a common ancestor that had already separated from plants. But, it's not sure.
Every gardening also
I wonder which of that ancestor’s descendants would be its favorite child.
I don't. I know.
I have a deep connection to willows.
40% pussy willow, 40% weeping willow, 20% banana.
Will future generations ever look at trees the way we look at primates today?
I imagine that would spell trouble for our eating habits.
It'll be fine. Sharks are older than trees so we can switch to them.
I mean, people already are...
We don't have a better definition for consciousness then "it's what anesthesia stops" and we don't have a better idea about what anesthesia does than "stops consciousness". So it's a chicken/egg thing.
The thing is, anesthesia works on everything, humans, animals, plants, even single celled organisms.
Literally everything is consciousness. Tomatoes even feel pain thru our most common definitions.
So yeah, people that claim to be vegan because of animal suffering are still causing suffering and pain to life, then ending that life.
You'd need to be some super specific type of vegan where you only eat fruits because those specifically evolved to be eaten in a symbiotic relationship with animals.
But like, I'm pretty sure that would just give you organic diabetes or something.
So everyone draws their personal line wherever, but none of us really have an "ethical diet"
TIL! Never heard that definition, thanks for that.
As for your point, it's one I like to make sometimes, even though I'm fully in favor of veganism. One just cannot avoid trampling ants when walking. It's such a fine line, even a paradox that keeps sucking me in. None of the extremes would work: eat everything vs eat nothing. The line drawn by society will always seem arbitrary, no matter where it's at.
TIL! Never heard that definition, thanks for that.
Yeah, it's pretty accurate and comes from the guy most equipped to talk about what consciousness is.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Hameroff
He's spent the last 30 years working on consciousness with literally the world's smartest physicist if not human:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose
Like, you know how everyone knows Stephen Hawking? Penrose was the guy doing the hard science to finish up Eisntein's work, Hawking was the "face" who explained it to people. When it was just Penrose and Hawking working on something, Hawking was the dumb guy at the table. Which is just wild.
But for the longest time people said Hameroff and Penrose couldn't have been right because quantum entanglement couldn't happen somewhere as "warm and wet" as the brain. About 11 months ago we found out microtubules can not only work as tubes that can sustain entanglement, it can sustain quantum superposition.
So, another decade or two and we should have a better answer for what consciousness is and what anesthesia actually does. But for now, that's the best we can do
One just cannot avoid trampling ants when walking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa_in_Jainism#Ascetic_practices_for_adherence_to_Ahimsa
Jain ascetics sweep the ground before them to avoid injuring the most minuscule forms of life. They generally brush the ground clear of insects before they tread. Digambara monks do not wear any clothes and eat food only when it is not prepared for themselves. Ascetics of the Śvētāmbara tradition wear a small mask to avoid taking in tiny insects.
Apparently, some already try since quite some time now
Amazing! :o
Yep, literally every single living thing has a common ancestor.
Monkey? Yep.
Tree? Yep.
Octopus? Yep?
Mushroom? Yep?
Bacteria? Yep.
What if a bunch of the earliest life spontaneously formed by the millions independently in different places? Would we all really have a true single common ancestor then?
Edit: I think there's been a misunderstanding. I believe that all life on earth came from the same "species", being the same kind of structure spontaneously generated in the primordial soup, but that there could've been a number of those structures that were generated and were all identical to each other. This would mean that any of them could evolve from the same starting point in terms of "design", but not literally be the exact same object, meaning that we could have a number of origin ancestors that were all identical, and were potentially not an exact one singular living thing.
Some (probably bacteria-like) form of life appeared almost as soon as conditions made it possible, so it’s conceivable that it arose multiple times in earth’s history. But eucaryotes (animals, plants, and fungi) took almost half the lifetime of the earth to appear, and have a lot of contingent features, so it’s overwhelmingly likely that all eucaryotes have a common ancestor.
There are a bunch of characteristics that, while fairly arbitrary, can't be changed once they are locked in. The mappings from RNA to proteins are a good example. Changing it is instantly lethal to the cell involved. Others include the chirality of amino acids, and the choice of bases for DNA.
If we look at the entire tree of life, we see no deviations in these deep characteristics. This implies that they were fixed before we all split. There might have been alternative variations in the past, but none have survived to the modern day (that we have identified).
This goes double of eucaryotes (basically everything other than bacteria). The design is so unique that convergent evolution is highly unlikely to stumble into the exact same layout from 2 sources.
Ah, alright that's a fair point. Once one of those splits happened then that single life form would have become the common ancestor for all other life. I'm satisfied with that explanation.
It's almost a certainly that all current life on earth has the same common ancestors. It makes sense for a ton of reasons.
For example all living organism have dna, and they all use the same 4 nucleic acids that their dna is made from. Neither of those facts are necessary requirements for life to exist, so since 100% of life does both of those things then that's very strong evidence that 100% of life had a common ancestor.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_life
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor
And tardigrades, just to give you the warm fuzzies.
This is actually true both humans and trees are eukaryotes....