this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
131 points (97.1% liked)
Showerthoughts
41083 readers
774 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
This. The window in which water isn't solid or a gas is very, very small.
[H2O as plasma has entered the chat]
But that's also the window where life is likely to form and be possible, so it's unlikely there are aliens who think it's weird.
Where we think* it's likely to form. We've yet to find verifiable genesis elsewhere, and so we can't well determine whether the nature of our genesis is common or rare. And how many times has life started on Earth alone?
Similarly, our definition of life may need changing upon alien discoveries.
However, there really aren't many candidates for systems of complex chemistry that don't primarily revolve around water and carbon. Water's role as a 'universal solvent' that's not so aggressive that it tears other molecules apart is extremely important for life to be able to form, and it's very difficult to replicate that effect with any other chemical.
And not even worrying about liquid water for a moment, the temperature range itself could be crucial to life forming and operating. At very low temperatures, chemicals tend to react slower, to the point of becoming overly stable and inert, so it's difficult to get any complex reactions going that could lead to life. At very high temperatures, chemicals react quickly and become unstable, so it's difficult to get any complex molecules to stay together more than a few seconds. Even without worrying about the chemistry of water, there's a relatively narrow range of temperatures where the extremely complex chemistry of life is possible.
Maybe it's possible for life to form and exist outside the normal 'goldilocks zone' conditions we think of as favorable for it ... but the deeper you look into it, the less and less likely that seems.
Only once that mattered. It has surely started countless times ... but every time after that first one was extremely short-lived, because whatever primitive proto-life managed to develop in subsequent times was quickly out-competed and/or eaten by the life that had already developed, evolved, and become much more advanced.
We can be sure none of these other starts ever led to lasting lineages by looking at genetics and the chirality of certain organic molecules. All living things on earth share at least some genes in common, and their DNA (or RNA) work the exact same way, with the exact same chemical structures. For organic molecules that can either have left-handed or right-handed chirality, all living things on earth produce and interact with the same left or right-handed versions, never the opposite chiral pairs ... even though it was only up to chance which one of them developed first. (DNA itself is one of those chiral molecules -- in every organism on earth, the double helix of DNA twists in the same direction, never the opposite direction.) There's no fundamental reason for life to prefer one direction over the other; if life had started multiple times and led to multiple lineages, we'd expect to see each lineage having different chirality preferences.
"The property or quality that distinguishes living organisms from dead organisms and inanimate matter, manifested in functions such as metabolism, growth, reproduction, and response to stimuli or adaptation to the environment originating from within the organism."
Nah. If it doesn't at least mostly match that definition, it's not alive.
Though if we ever manage to make self-replicating robots, we very well might have to revisit that definition ... or accept that the robots are alive.