I’ve always liked developing ecosystems and civilizations in exotic conditions, so when I read all about the underwater civ forum wars, I knew I had to get involved in it. At least for now, I have constrained myself to a very “vanilla” scenario to keep speculation to a minimum and so that we may apply knowledge from humanity’s own technological progression.
Before we begin, I’d like to thank TeaKing and hhyyrylainen for granting me permission to post this, I know its hard given how all other large threads had to be closed by force, and the small ones out of fear of becoming the same type of mess as the larger ones.
To avoid using too much of the forum’s storage space or text being illegible due to compression, I have prepared a view-only link to the Canva project:
In accordance with the new underwater civ thread rules, here are my sources:
I apologize for the subpar quality of the sources and the project itself, as I was uncertain as to where to find information that could be useful in such a specific scenario, so I had to design much from scratch or iterate upon other forum users’ ideas.
I’m sorry if this devolves into another mess of a thread that needs to be closed, as that will make the topic even harder to discuss later down the line, but errors are necessary to learn, so by all means, tear this apart.
2 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
2
This is probably the solidmost underwater civilization argument I’ve seen so far, though getting the first metals into usable forms still remains the weakmost point for the whole theory. Still better than pretty much anything else posted into the forum.
Also, isn’t oil pretty toxic to most organisms?
Thanks, I’m still working on it; as for the issue of oil, yeah, it’s toxic, its flammability would likely be discovered from a patch of it burning on the surface of the water, probably after killing any small creatures on its ascent from oil seeps, however, while dissolved in water, it shouldn’t be as sticky and thus not as hard to deal with as for Earth’s sea birds
1 Like
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
4
Overall how much longer do you think an underwater civ’s society stage would play out when compared with an abovewater civ’s?
For NPC or theoretical irl civs, since a lot of random chance is involved, I could see it taking significantly longer, especially as we distance ourselves from this near-ideal scenario
As for Player-led civs, odds are any serious attempts at making an underwater civ will be made by already experienced players that plan in advance, so they’ll know what to do, thus reducing development time to how long it takes to collect resources for my “totally useless” complex machine that AutoEvo tells me is gonna bankrupt me
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
6
So pretty much any underwater civ more likely than not doomed if a land civ emerges at the same time as it?
It’s possible, but not necessary. The oceans have been mostly “out of bounds” for us for most of our history, so interspecies war might be impossible to wage until scuba and reverse-scuba gear are developed, and by then, it’s likely diplomacy has been given a chance, with communities that can make use of both environments having an advantage
As an user on the third old thread said, it’d be wholesome to see 2 civilizations working together to reach space
2 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
8
Two species becoming civs at the same time is unlikely, though you can do get multiple sapients living alongside a single civ species (like we see irl with humans and elephants, other apes and corvids).
This does not qualify as the challenge was to prepare a scientific essay. That means you need to have references to basically back up each one of your sentences and format that to look like a scientific article.