this post was submitted on 27 Oct 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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The universe is humongous.

  • The hard drive space is practically limited to the Big Bang on one end and the heat death of the universe on the other, but it contains all of the data for everything that exists. That's massive.

  • The RAM is massive because it's handling all the variables and changes of the present.

  • The cache is much smaller as established by the study that found the universe is not locally real. Things only happen once they are observed, but it happens almost instantaneously. Still, the cache is massive because it is handling everything that is being observed at the same time. That's a lot of things.

All of the above are massive extremes. However,

  • The processing speed is limited at the speed of light. In comparison to the others, the speed of light is soooooo ridiculously slow, causing a bottle neck.

PS - Massive because it's mass I've observed. Not really tho, you silly goat. Big bang while I swig Tang and watch a twig hang.

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[โ€“] [email protected] -1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Do you think of life as being an ordered system? It seems pretty chaotic to me.

Anyway, if I relate my concept of a 'natural system' to biology, then I'd point out that there isn't really an upper limit to how fast animals go. I mean, sure, they're limited by their size or aerodynamics, but a cheetah doesn't have a 'top speed' that it bottoms out at, it could push harder or be induced to move faster.

If I think of it as a force of nature, I'd think about how water flows. The speed of a river isn't constant, and it could be manipulated or induced to move faster.

So from that lens, it just seems odd that there are universal constants, like the speed of light. You'd think some lights would move faster or slower than others based on their composition, because that's the behaviour we seem to experience in nature.

This isn't a serious debate or belief of mine. I accept the laws of science because they're testable, demonstrable, and repeatable. But when you contemplate the unknowable (what does God look like, anyway?), it's a fun diversion.

Also we're such an infinitesimally small part of the universe that I'm inclined to believe that if we are in a simulation, we're the bug that crawled into the computer.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

I would think of life as being ordered, yes. complicated, and with components small enough that we have a hard time envisioning it, but its not really much different from what you would get if you made a bunch of microscopic robots able to assemble more of themselves, and had them stick together to form a larger structure. We would probably imagine such things be made of something other than water and carbon chemistry, because when we make machines we usually use metal and silicon, but at the scale of cells where a component can be an individual molecule, carbon chemistry works well. I just think that we have poor intuition for what chaotic and ordered systems look like if the scale is beyond what we can see unaided.