this post was submitted on 06 Jun 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.

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the rocks are alive (feddit.org)
submitted 2 weeks ago by gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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ok so sorry if this sounds like a nonsensical rambling to you, i've just had an enlightenment

so for a while now i've known about the aristotelian 4 elements worldview that says that the world is composed of consecutive layers laying on top of each other.

there's at least two variants of it: for the living and for the dead world. i.e. when you have living beings in the world or not. when there are living beings, the four layers are (from bottom to top): rocks, plants, animals, spirits (i.e. ideas / politics). each layer needs the lower one to feed itself, i.e. animals feed off plants. meanwhile they give resources to the upper layer to get their services, i.e. plants get their fruit eaten but get their seeds carried around.

for the dead, there's four layers: rocks, water, air, energy (i.e. fire / sunlight). for example, the water corresponds to the plants because in every pond, algae start to grow etc.

now, what has bothered me is that rocks appear in both listings, which is weird. i think that the dirt is alive kinda solves this, because rocks (dead) and rocks (living) are not the same anymore. one is settled with microorganisms, the other one is not.

eh, idk whether that makes sense to you. have a nice day.

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[–] gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

yeah ... i'm still not fully convinced. the model has its uses but also its weaknesses. a good use case is that it demonstrates both evolutionary history and short-term history.

like in evolution, microorganisms (that probably fed of rock) were the first living beings with a high likelihood (RNA world hypothesis). this is represented by the bottom layer in the model. then developed plants/cyanobacteria that could utilize sunlight (great oxidation event). only after that it was possible for complex life, including multicellular animals, to develop, which feed off the copious amounts of biomass that the plants produce. so the short-term dependency of animals on plants is in fact reflected in evolutionary history, where (complex) animals could also only develop after plants.

it is no accident that eukaryotes developed after cyanobacteria. also all complex (multicellular) life is based on eukaryotes.

and only then were rites and spirituality (or just call it brain) in animals developed.

[–] TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 weeks ago

When you view that concept as a timeline, it fits pretty well.

Microbes can utilise rocks to make life, but that doesn’t really make the rocks alive. There’s a layer of primitive life sustained by dead rocks, or elements leached off them. Hydrothermal vents are a good example of that.