It occurs to me 2 hours and a half dozen posts later I am confusing the Awakening stage hand made tools tree and the Social stage research tree. So I guess a lock to keep underwater civs from researching metal working might be necessary, depending on how the mechanic of discovering it in the first place is implemented, but for subterranean civs, I ask, if they can’t go above ground anyway, would stopping them from researching rocketsbe necessary. Then again,if they make air tight doors and space suits, they might be able to use those to travel to surface in the first place.
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If they can go to the surface, perhaps they could figure out that there must be something above it… But that’s for devs to figure out if blind civs in space are achievable.
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Subterranean wouldn’t necessarily be blind. Though most do have poor or no eyesight. Bats have normal daylight eyesight but spend there lives in the dark relying on hearing. They never “unevolved” eyesight they rarely use now. If the creature had eyesight of some kind before going underground, it could keep it. A truly blind creature probably would not go to space. Though i guess advanced sonar technology beyond what earth has might allow them to.
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If we’re talking about those “small planet subterranean-only ecosystems”, the chance that these sapients would have eyesight is far more slim…
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It’s a question of when and why did they go underground. If they evolved to multicellular in an underwater cave and never moved to land at all, yeah, they would be blind. And the more I think about it, they less plausible the advanced sonar idea sounds. If they evolved as land creatures first and managed to successfully go entirely underground when the surface was becoming uninhabitable, that’s a whole different story.
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Are we sure that mole-level eyes are enough to get those creatures interested in the skies above?
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Again, sort of depends, some of them would have too poor eyesight to see far, but some of them might be good enough. “Junk” DNA (eyes that are not being used much if at all) can stick around awhile. There eye sight would likely be comparable to before they went underground. Though, not using them for much of their life, they would need time to adjust to surface light after finally coming up. Likely only a higher level intelligence would try to adjust to sunlight after spending a lifetime without it. Aware but unawakened moles would probably think “light is painful” and go back underground.
Edit: Also
Edit: Also, moles may be really Near-Sighted, but Telescopes could help with that.
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There’s still many creatures which lost their eyes alltogether after coming underground. Perhaps it would be easier for them to evolve sight again than for a species which never had eyes?
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Possibly. Maybe they could even use science to restore degenerated eye sight, or replace whats left of their eyes with bio-enhanced ones, assuming they still have an ocular space to put it in.
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I recall there already was an entire thread discusing the viability of blind civs…
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So here’s a question, Earth’s moon has a day/night cycle that last 27.32 earth days. I know there are some plant’s that can survive in “low-light”, and I believe “saplings” can go weeks without light, but can a full grown tree? Would a moon be able to sustain a forest with such long nights?
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Plants could probably adapt to such “long D/N cycle” planets, in the case of more extreme ones day could be like summer and night like winter.
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I never considered that. Yeah that’s a great point.
Although, Conifers and other Evergreens probably would have more difficulty with that.
Aren’t most Rainforest trees evergreen? And Taiga are entirely Coniferous. Could Rainforests and Taiga handle frequent winters with no sunlight?
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Probably not. On such a planet there wouldn’t really be any sort of a “tropical zone” where rainforests could form.
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The requirement isn’t tropics. Temperate zones work too if you have sunlight and loads of water.
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Those planets would also likely have their weather patterns tied to the time of the “day cycle”, with perhaps the winds moving in one general direction across such globes.
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Horrific weather patterns will be great for rainfall.
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The thing is that this rain will then be affected by either scorching temperatures of the day or freezing colds of the night. Meaning that the plants would need to be ready for considerable periods of no rainfall.
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Ehh, barely. If there’s wind and extreme heat the day side will have a TON of evaporated seawater, and the wind will wind up VERY extreme on average. This means that if it’s disproportionate (which it likely will be) that some weird little coast or valley could get very high amounts of rain during a few periods in each the day and night, allowing for rainforests. This isn’t a guarantee, but heat and cold don’t actually preclude constant rain. On Earth very high heat is often caused by a lack of rain, so it’ll never rain somewhere it’s death valley levels of hot (except death valley, but the weather there is basically a meme) because that would contradict itself, places only get to 120 F (almost 49 C) by being dry. If the heat is coming whatever you do, no laws prevent you from being humid. I’m sure similar things effect cold (ignoring the freezing temp), but I won’t argue those cause… I dunno. As for the freezing temp, yeah, that’s an issue, but near the poles the distance to warmth will be minimal. The winds will act to normalize temperature and while they’ll most likely fail, they’ll try.
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I recall there was a suggestion once to put these “long day-night” period planets and “Extreme tilt” planets into a category seperate from “regular” planets and “eyeball” planets.
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