this post was submitted on 28 Aug 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:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. 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
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. 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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[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm not convinced it's only happened once.

A new bacterium could have been created in the ocean yesterday. How would we ever know?

[–] AmidFuror@fedia.io 2 points 1 day ago

Assume you mean from simple building blocks instead of evolving from the reproduction of other bacteria, we could know if there were ever enough of this new bacterium for us to find and isolate it.

For one thing, if it didn't come from other living things it would not share the genetic code. Almost all organisms on earth use exactly the same translation of RNA codons to amino acids. The few exceptions are changes of just a couple of codons which had fallen to very low frequencies in the hosts' genomes.

That universal code is one of the reasons we know all life discovered to date evolved from a common ancestor.

A new bacterium, if it evolved convergently to use DNA and RNA and a 3 letter code (a big if), would not use the same translation as modern life. Even if there is some bias towards specific codons, the chance of the same core code happening twice is astronomically low.