this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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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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That is not how speed works in relativity. Even moving with 10 times the speed of light, you still take "forward time" to move to your end point.
What will be happening though is that your point of reference will seem to travel backwards related to your starting point IF you travel away from your starting point.
So you move with FTL from A to B, then you will see A's past light, which you overtook while traveling to B, arriving at B, thereby seeing your past "as happening now", but only at point B. But the time will still be ticking forward. And while you travelled to B, you raced against the light coming from B, meaning you travelled faster into the future of B.
If you then travel back with same speed from B to A, you will still be in the future from when you started in the first place. But you will see yourself standing at B. And again, while travelling from B to A, you raced against the light coming from A, meaning you saw that future happening at FTL speed.
There’s no such thing as speeds faster than light—the worldlines of objects with such trajectories are called “spacelike” instead of “timelike” for a reason. “Forward” and “backward” time is only defined for events within your light-cone, and trajectories “faster than light” are outside it. Whether events outside your light-cone are in your future or your past are dependent on your current reference frame, which you can change at will by accelerating—so spacelike trajectories have no intrinsic direction with respect to time.
The thing about “moving with FTL from A to B” is that if B is far away, the event at B simultaneous with your departure from A will be highly dependent on A’s reference frame—a shift in A’s velocity will correspond to a shift in B’s timeline equal to (vx/c^2^)/√(1-v^2^/c^2^) (where v is the change in A’s velocity and x is the distance to B). And things are changing velocities with respect to each other all the time (e.g., for objects on earth due to the planet’s revolution and rotation around the sun), so the point in B’s timeline at which you’d arrive would be constantly swinging backward and forward in time.
And the same is true for the return trip: a minor change in B’s reference frame can put your arrival back in A’s timeline at a point before your original departure.