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 most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

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At some point in history, there must have been more nuclear warheads than there were people living in Greenland (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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What's that I hear you say? I'm a hack fraud whose shower thoughts are stupid and have no evidence? I agree, so I did some digging in the literature and found the following:

A graph of the nuclear arsenals of the USA and USSR from 1945–2019.

A graph showing the number of nuclear warheads held by the United States and the Soviet Union from 1945 to 2019. Sources listed are Kristensen and Norris (2015) and the FAS Nuclear Notebook (2014–2019). The sum at one point is over 60,000.

A graph of the population of Greenland from 1780–2000.

A graph showing the population of Greenland from 1780 to 2000. At no point does the population ever rise above 60,000.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

A friend brought up Greenland nuking somebody as a joke. And I imagined how disproportionate a retaliatory strike could be, quickly remembering though that the current population is less than 60,000 and that I'm almost certain I've seen figures of more than 60,000 nukes during the Cold War, so I imagined a retaliatory strike where literally every person in Greenland had a personalized nuke.

The research was done make sure I wasn't misremembering, that Greenland didn't at any point exceed 60,000 (thus necessitating a closer comparison), and that I'm not Senator Armstrong-ing this.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Thank you. I don't know that I ever knew that statistic about Greenland's population. The nuke statistic tossed around - that I always heard - was something like "there are enough nukes to blow up the world a million times," with is a silly, sloppy metric that doesn't day anything about the actual warhead count. Are those Tsar Bombas, or Fat Man? How many megatons are required to "blow up the world" once? But that graph is interesting; it's even more interesting that there population of Greenland and the number of (viable) warheads on the planet have been so relatively close.