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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
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Science Memes
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Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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If you are here asking: "Is this a science meme?"
Probably, yes. We use the Dawkins definition of meme: a replicating idea, not just an image macro with a fact on it. A good post here doesn't need to teach you something. It needs to make you ask something: who, what, where, when, and especially why or how.
Science isn't a filing cabinet of facts, it's a conversation. For example, a photo of an eel or other localized wildlife counts because most people never see one, and wonder is the first step of inquiry. A car meme counts if it makes you curious about what's under the bonnet. If you want to talk about something you noticed in the world, chances are someone else wants to talk about it too.
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See the pinned paper on Shitposting as Public Pedagogy if you want the academic case for why this works.
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What would be the point of a universe if there was nothing experiencing it?
Who or what is it "best" for?
What is the "point" of this universe?
Us. Conscious creatures humans or otherwise. We are the genesis of "point".
By analogy, what's the point of a sun, or a planet, being a thing? It just is, right? A mechanism of nature.
Maybe we are do, but it's undeniable that we experience reality. Experience is the only thing they can have a point, by definition. This is simply axiomatic.
There is no knowing a universe without knowers, so whether something just is, absent is, is a nonsense question. Sense to whom, after all?
I’m sticking that as text over an image of Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
Haha, that we, but same difference.
Why does the universe need to be known?
What makes 'us' so special that the worth of a whole universe is determined by our existence, inspite of the brevity of human history? Written history has only been around for 5,000. The oldest homo sapiens has only been around for 300,000 years. Was the universe insignificant for the rest of its 13,799,700,000 years?
It doesn't. But "needing" itself is an undefined term without consciousness - definition itself is a product of conscious experience.
The point is that there is no fact of a universe existing without something that can know facts. It's necessarily tautological, after all we cannot know not existing.
Were we not, the universe could not be as we know it. Whether or not it exists at all without us cannot matter, because mattering itself cannot be defined without a definer, nor can existence itself be verified without a verifier.
That which "just is" could be absolutely anything at any time.
In other words, Maybe the big bang happened some 13.8 billion years ago and over all this time events transpired until the first consciousnesses came online. Suddenly the universe knows being. Then one day you come online, somewhere around the age of 5 or 6.
Or... That is just what it looks like to you and in reality someone preprogrammed the simulation and switched it on and you came into existence at the moment of your oldest memory. All that history is true only in the sense that it's what the simulation shows you. But 13.8 billion years never really happened.
That's basically how it is, and it doesn't need to be an external simulation. Those 13.8 billion years had nothing in them to experience, to remember, or to document concepts like duration, and years are a relational measurement we invented.