this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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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 best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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I like the idea that the Great Filter is really just civilizations turning inward. Like they all get to a point where they realize that space travel is just really not viable and so they stop looking to explore the universe or find other life. Instead they turn to virtual worlds to prolong their existence with what resources they have available in their own star systems. Not even Dyson spheres or anything, they just go into digital hibernation and live out the rest of their lifetimes in a fabricated paradise for however long they can. Maybe they're able to use drugs/genetics/whatever to slow time down to a crawl where it feels like they live thousands of years within a normal lifespan.
For Outer Wilds fans, basically:
spoiler
OwlksLike uploads? If so, couldn't they have all this fun while slowly traveling the universe?
"We're sorry to interrupt everyone's simulation, but we're happy to remind you that you're a person on a spaceship and we just found something interesting!"
Then we would start 'behavorial sink' and slowly decline in population. Someone else mentioned Calhoun and his rat utopia the other day and I looked it up. It seems like we are going through our version of behavioral sink.