this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2025
73 points (94.0% liked)
Showerthoughts
36891 readers
658 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
For all we know it did. We believe that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old but it's estimated that conditions suitable for life only appeared about 200 million years after that. Since the oldest fossils we've found are 3.7 billion years old, there is a 600 million year gap between when we think life could have formed and out earliest records of it.
There is every possibility that life formed multiple times in different environments on Earth in those first few hundred million years and then been wiped out by one of the frequent cataclysms that ravaged the early Earth. We have no way of knowing though. If life formed around a volcanic vent and then got wiped out by a meteor impact there would be no evidence it ever happened. Even if such life was wiped out by a climatic shift or something like that, there still wouldn't likely be much evidence left if any right now. The Earth's surface has been changed so much in the last 3.7 billion years, there are very few areas older than that where such fossil records from before that could be found.
And there's a good chance that other life would be chemically or structurally similar, so without DNA evidence we'd confuse it's fossils with others (see Prototaxites).
Also, maybe life does reoccur relatively frequently, but is killed by existing bacteria, viruses, bacteriophage... again, for being too chemically/structurally similar to the existing life.
Isn't there evidence mitochondria took a different evolutionary path before they were captured by cells?
There are also a few other really weird cellular-scale life forms I forget the names of that could be different evolutionary paths. Though I'd think the seeming hegemony of life comes from life competing in the same environments and either killing off or adapting to/with other evolutionary chains like with mitochondria. It surely wouldn't take billions or even millions of years for microscopic life to spread across Earth, so there's been plenty of time for any different upstarts to mix or kill off each other.