this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
496 points (95.3% liked)
Showerthoughts
35230 readers
584 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
Unless these aliens can break the laws of physics their cameras will produce heat and have to send signals somewhere. So we'll be able to detect them.
Humans didn't even have the technology to observe most of the eletromagnegtic spectrum for like practically all of human history apart from the recent hundred of years or so, bold of you to assume there isn't higher form of techology that's undetectable to us. I mean, the North Sentinese and other uncontacted tribes around the world still can't even fanthom that we are talking to each other using radiowaves in the air.
There is this sci-fi novel called Three Body Problem and
spoiler
the aliens used a high tech AI supercomputer called the "Sophons" that can be invisible to humans and are spying on Earth in order to plan for an invasion. Humans only figured out after scientists started dying, seemingly mysteriously.Its sci-fi, but like, they could just take advantage of the tech we already have and hack our servers to gather data, and even if humans figure it out about the hacking, they would just think it was human criminal and its just labeled as a "databreach". (Who knows, maybe one of the databreaches are actually just aliens gathering data.)
Like... goverments run by humans already out so much cameras in the streets, aliens can just... tap into the feed lol. Use our own surveillance state against us.
I think it's very unlikely that there will ever be a technology that can get around fundamental laws of nature, like entropy.
Phase shifting into a different dimension
shifting into other dimensions would probably take a lot of energy and produce heat
Same way people in the past probably said there's no way you can make anything work without a mechanical mechanism? Can you imagine what an electronic device/chip would look to someone from far past? People thought humans couldn't fly.
Those "fundamental science" is just us making sense of the universe in a way we can observe it and even then we don't know everything. Can you imagine how different the universe looks if you just shift the electro magnetic waves you can see.
No, I don't think it's comparable. We've figured out most of the big picture, now it's mostly just filling in gaps here and there and making correction. I doubt there is an entire new force or field hiding that would allow completley undetectable communications from us. Maybe you could do something with neutrinos, we're quite bad at detecting them for now.
Yeah, I've looked through an infrared camera and seen pictures from x-ray telescopes.
We have absolutely not figured out most of the big picture.
One easy proof example: death. Everyone will experience this feeling, yet no one has a clue what happens with 100% certainly after death. Yet it's one of the most fundamental things about life and existence. What is non-existence?
Of course we do. Unless steps are taken, it's usually rotting and decomposing. There is literally farms where we study what happens to us after death. The physics of death are no mystery.
I'm talking about the nature of the soul and spirit.
But this comment chain is about the limits that physics imposes on technology.
There is no evidence for the existence of souls or spirits, so they don't really factor into that discussion.
I see what you're saying. But I also think the comment chain is speaking to the limits of our knowledge. The "limits that physics imposes on technology" is only based on what human beings have figured out through our limits of testing the rules of existence. What we can't test, we have never been able to prove. And some things we may never be able to test or prove (such as Dark Matter).
It's easy to say there isn't evidence of something, just as easy as it is to say that it's because it's past our limit/ability to test those things right now.
Absolutly, I'm not disputing that.
My point was going in the opposite direct. Some of the stuff we know we can be pretty sure about so I'd say it's safe to assume that even an advanced alien technology couldn't get around them. Like the speed of light, conservation of energy, entropy, etc.
Right, but when considering practical applications, like technology, it doesn't really make a difference. If something exists but I don't know (and currently can't know) that it exists, it might as well not exist. The result is the same.
Lmao. I've heard that one before. Almost 200 year ago in fact.
https://4gravitons.com/2016/03/11/in-defense-of-lord-kelvin-michelson-and-the-physics-of-decimals/#%3A%7E%3Atext=William+Thompson%2C+Lord+Kelvin%2C+was%2Cmore+and+more+precise+measurement.
Just called it a bit too early. But that's mostly where we at now, technology is just catching up to theoretical physics. But I doubt we'll get many more discoveries on the same society-changing level like electricity or radio waves were.
But hey, it would be much more interesting if I'm wrong.
They could easily send the signals away from us. How would we detect something like that?
Satellites.
How would our satellites detect something outside normal orbits?
By looking at Earth? That's how most of them work.
lol so they can’t see anything outside the orbit. Just put a camera there.
I tried going down this line of thinking too, but any assumption you make is predicated on the belief that they would use means that we are familiar with. Just because we do not know of a way to do such and such does not mean it does not exist. This post is referring to a fundamental epistemic problem.
Heat is directed into the 8th dimension.
No wonder why the Red Lectroids are so permanently pissed off.