Share Your Shower Thoughts

[EvilRoy]

Why is tile and grout so common for shower walls? Grout's such a pain to clean >_>

Before poly and waterproof glue it was almost the only way to protect wall structures from the constant moisture in a bathroom.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Consider the scale.

The big bang happened around 13 billion years ago.

Our solar system formed around 4.5 billion years ago.
Life appeared between 3.5 and 4 billion years ago.
The cambrian explosion happened 0.5 billion years ago (500 million years)
The first hominids evolved 0.02 billion years ago (20 million years)
Modern homo sapiens evolved around 0.0002 billion years ago (200,000 years).
The first cities appeared around 0.00001‬ billion years ago (10,000 years)

So, let's assume the universe was pretty chaotic and hostile for a couple of billion years after the big bang. That still leaves us 6.5 billion years during which other habitable, life-supporting planets could have formed before earth. Let's say one of those planets produced intelligent life, and a mere one billion years ago, a pretty short time compared to the age of the universe, they launched their first space craft..

If that were the case, then at the time these aliens were making their first attempts at space travel, multicellular life doesn't exist on earth yet.

However huge the task of populating the galaxy might be does not matter much at this point. The aliens have inconceivable amount of time. Without some kind of faster than light propulsion, it will take them millions of years to colonize every star in the galaxy, but they have a billion years. Whatever setbacks, whatever political concerns or whatever local circumstances might block our alien super society from exponential expansion, the timeframe is so great that it is ultimately not going to matter. Heck, even extinction might not stop them, another species could simply evolve and do the same thing without really eating into the timeframe very much.

If you look at it in these terms, the question becomes less "why haven't these aliens come to visit us" and more "why can't we find evidence of their existence". Why doesn't every star in the sky have a dyson swarm? Why has our solar system not already been disassembled for its resources? Heck, even if aliens evolved in other galaxies, there's a decent chance we'd be able to see them because once they become advanced enough they should start leaving marks on the galaxy itself, and there's no reason we can imagine why they wouldn't become that advanced. Again, they have time. They have more time than we can possibly imagine.

Even worse, there are so many stars and, potentially, so many habitable planets in our galaxy that this should have happened many times. So even if our hypothetical aliens wanted to hide their presence out of some kind of respect for the prime directive, and could somehow sustain that belief for literal aeons across countless star systems where (assuming they were still recognizable as organic life) the inhabits would have long since ceased to be the same species, there should be so many aliens at this point that you'd think there would be some evidence of their presence.

The Fermi paradox isn't meant to indicate for certain that advanced alien civilizations don't exist. Heck, a billion year old civilization would be so unimaginably ancient that it may have long since stopped according with any technological or cultural paradigm we can imagine or observe. It's just pointing out something that is weird and incongruous.

Yes, but even to reach the conclusion of weird and incongruous requires multiple assumptions that I cannot in good faith find agreeable. The sheer scale of the size of this universe is not factored in. The matter of an increasing speed of expanding size. The methods of our data collection in context of the size and expansion meaning it's akin to a person trying to explain a painting of a reflection off another wobbly reflection of the shadows in Plato's cave, alongside the fact that it's all inherently out of date and increasingly out of date the further out we look to a point that we may never even see past a certain point of expansion and never will unless ftl travel is made possible. The assumption of how alien life would evolve. The assumption that interstellar travel and dominance must be the natural conclusion of any alien evolution. The spark of a creation of life requires such a huge pile up of coincidences also. I'm sure I'm forgetting more currently due to heavy head, but it's just too much to find it's weird. It's was thought up a long time ago though, so I'm accounting for the difference in collective knowledges to not be that bothered by it.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Yes, but even to reach the conclusion of weird and incongruous requires multiple assumptions that I cannot in good faith find agreeable. The sheer scale of the size of this universe is not factored in. The matter of an increasing speed of expanding size.

So, the group of physicists who casually proposed the Fermi paradox (including Enrico Fermi) didn't have access to the same scientific knowledge we do today, but they were on a basic level aware of the size of the universe.

But here's the thing, we don't need to consider the entire size of the universe. Most of it is so far away that it is basically not relevant to us. Even if aliens evolved in distant galaxies, we'd never be able to visit them and they'd never be able to visit us (short of some kind of faster than light travel). The only region of space that actually matters is our own galaxy and, to a much, much lesser extent, the group of galaxies to which it belongs (the local group).

The galaxy and local group are really, really big by any standard we can possibly imagine. They contain an impossible number of stars and probably an impossible number of planets. But, in terms of the size of the universe - and more importantly the age of the universe - they're actually relatively small. They're small enough that even with spaceship propulsion methods we could build, journey times to travel around the galaxy would be measured in thousands of years, or millions of years for journeys around the local group. That's a very long time to us, but it's a tiny, tiny amount of time compared to the multi-billion year age of the universe.

Even if alien life had only ever evolved in a single planet, as in the example, with a billion year headstart they should have had more than enough time to colonise the entire galaxy, to seed it with life and to exploit its resources even if their progress was hugely, hugely slower than our own. Trying to spot a civilization which inhabits the entire galaxy shouldn't be hard, even for us. The amount of control they would theoretically have developed over the star systems they colonized would make them extremely difficult to miss.

The assumption of how alien life would evolve. The assumption that interstellar travel and dominance must be the natural conclusion of any alien evolution.

Wouldn't it be, given sufficient time?

Again, we're talking about a span of time so impossibly vast that anything that could happen probably will. Besides, it's not even like our theoretical aliens would need to travel the stars themselves. They could build machines to do it, or just fire worms at other planets and wait for them to evolve into intelligent life (remember, the evolution of multicellular life on earth was only something like half a billion years ago).

And all of this is assuming that life only evolved in a single other location at a single other point in the history of the galaxy.

There are a lot of solutions to the fermi paradox and "we just haven't seen evidence of the aliens yet" is one of them. It is entirely possible that we could have just missed the existence of vast alien civilizations. Maybe for some reason they don't build visible megastructures to live on, or to exploit resources, or they do but it's so rare that we haven't seen any yet. Maybe their social development has made the idea of perpetual expansion undesirable or obsolete, after all they probably wouldn't be beings like us at all (certainly not any more). But, from our perspective and our theoretical and social paradigm, it is still kind of weird.

 

[Xprimentyl]

Yes, but even to reach the conclusion of weird and incongruous requires multiple assumptions that I cannot in good faith find agreeable. The sheer scale of the size of this universe is not factored in. The matter of an increasing speed of expanding size.

So, the group of physicists who casually proposed the Fermi paradox (including Enrico Fermi) didn't have access to the same scientific knowledge we do today, but they were on a basic level aware of the size of the universe.

But here's the thing, we don't need to consider the entire size of the universe. Most of it is so far away that it is basically not relevant to us. Even if aliens evolved in distant galaxies, we'd never be able to visit them and they'd never be able to visit us (short of some kind of faster than light travel). The only region of space that actually matters is our own galaxy and, to a much, much lesser extent, the group of galaxies to which it belongs (the local group).

The galaxy and local group are really, really big by any standard we can possibly imagine. They contain an impossible number of stars and probably an impossible number of planets. But, in terms of the size of the universe - and more importantly the age of the universe - they're actually relatively small. They're small enough that even with spaceship propulsion methods we could build, journey times to travel around the galaxy would be measured in thousands of years, or millions of years for journeys around the local group. That's a very long time to us, but it's a tiny, tiny amount of time compared to the multi-billion year age of the universe.

Even if alien life had only ever evolved in a single planet, as in the example, with a billion year headstart they should have had more than enough time to colonise the entire galaxy, to seed it with life and to exploit its resources even if their progress was hugely, hugely slower than our own. Trying to spot a civilization which inhabits the entire galaxy shouldn't be hard, even for us. The amount of control they would theoretically have developed over the star systems they colonized would make them extremely difficult to miss.

The assumption of how alien life would evolve. The assumption that interstellar travel and dominance must be the natural conclusion of any alien evolution.

Wouldn't it be, given sufficient time?

Again, we're talking about a span of time so impossibly vast that anything that could happen probably will. Besides, it's not even like our theoretical aliens would need to travel the stars themselves. They could build machines to do it, or just fire worms at other planets and wait for them to evolve into intelligent life (remember, the evolution of multicellular life on earth was only something like half a billion years ago).

And all of this is assuming that life only evolved in a single other location at a single other point in the history of the galaxy.

There are a lot of solutions to the fermi paradox and "we just haven't seen evidence of the aliens yet" is one of them. It is entirely possible that we could have just missed the existence of vast alien civilizations. Maybe for some reason they don't build visible megastructures to live on, or to exploit resources, or they do but it's so rare that we haven't seen any yet. Maybe their social development has made the idea of perpetual expansion undesirable or obsolete, after all they probably wouldn't be beings like us at all (certainly not any more). But, from our perspective and our theoretical and social paradigm, it is still kind of weird.

Boy howdy, how can you folks manage wax this intellectual while in the shower scrubbing your naughty bits?

But these posts did remind me of the video below. It posits how humans could theoretically mitigate the size of the universe and expand into deep space (albeit not in any one lifetime) without ever traveling the speed of light. Interesting stuff and worth your consideration.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Boy howdy, how can you folks manage wax this intellectual while in the shower scrubbing your naughty bits?

Autism.

But these posts did remind me of the video below. It posits how humans could theoretically mitigate the size of the universe and expand into deep space (albeit not in any one lifetime) without ever traveling the speed of light. Interesting stuff and worth your consideration.

That was a fun video, and cuts to the heart of the issue pretty well.

 

[Xprimentyl]

Boy howdy, how can you folks manage wax this intellectual while in the shower scrubbing your naughty bits?

Autism.

But these posts did remind me of the video below. It posits how humans could theoretically mitigate the size of the universe and expand into deep space (albeit not in any one lifetime) without ever traveling the speed of light. Interesting stuff and worth your consideration.

That was a fun video, and cuts to the heart of the issue pretty well.

Glad you enjoyed the video, even more so that you?re conversation reminded me of it.

 

[Asita]

I just stumbled across an old post of mine where I drew a comparison between Bane of the Dark Knight Rises and Darth Vader of Star Wars. But it just now occurs to me that Bane's pretty much a dead ringer for Renard in the World is Not Enough...and that the World is Not Enough did pretty much the same story but done better (something I never expected to say about a James Bond flick). And I admit that I'm probably late to the party on that, but the thread's for shower thoughts, not new revelations

 

[Xprimentyl]

#1 sign that the COVID-19 virus quarantine needs to end: just took a shower, and as I was washing up, I realized that in all my years of life, my left hand has never touched my left elbow and it never will. Got a little emotional thinking about how body parts that have so much in common are the furthest apart. Then I got soap in my eyes... which, aside from in a reflection, will never see each other!

 

[Wintermute_v1legacy]

You need to keep practicing.