yoo we hit 3000 posts on this thread
30% of the way to part 3
my time will come again when its will come
if
Iâm not sure what that means but I support it
Do you think that futur3 will attack the forum again soon?
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I was sick yesterday and it was very weird. Like, i was feeling a fever but my temperature was normal.
Do you all think we will find life in Europa?
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Well, to my knowledge we arenât even 100% sure all of Europaâs oceans are water. Perhaps the lower layers have been compressed into those strange ice phases, which would make life hard or impossible due to lack of resources coming from oceanic floor.
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A major US healthcare system just went dark from a cyberattack.
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Name a more iconic duo than massive corporations and really terrible IT security.
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someone died?
or got free from the bills?
Alright I know this might still not be allowed to be talked about, but I just wanted to ask,
If there was any metal that could be smetaled, what would the most likely candidate be?
Lets say it has to be common enough to be found on the sea floor or by the shores and with the lowest possible melting temperature.
If you can find something that has a melting temperature that is lower than the temperature of a hydrothermal vent that will be hilarious.
well i did an somewhat quick research and apparently, Zamak has an somewhat enough low melting point to be used on hydrothermal forges (or at least being malleable), and it has some use on the gun industry. The problem is, how some cute alien dolphins would find that an random alloy of random metals could in certain conditions turn into an somewhat âusefulâ liquid on that weird hot places?
gallium
when you brand new gallium sword dissolves away 3 seconds before the battle for Uiâtaah starts:
hydrothermal
I didnât made any long posts since the axial tilt post I made 4 months ago. I feel like Iâm not contributing anything. I canât finish my drafts, I start new ones instead. This is terrible.
I think government institutions may suffer from cyber attacks because they are indeed bad at cyber security, due to being underfunded or corrupt. But corporations on the other hand may be using it for plausible deniability. Selling personal information would create more revenue, and if it is âstolenâ by third party actors, then people would see that company as a victim instead of the perpetrator.
Even if you can smelt some metal underwater, it would rust again, wouldnât it? They could form some sort of a primitive civilisation without metals, but how would they make the industrial revolution? Would they paint the pistons of the steam engines to prevent them from rusting? If this solves that problem, how are they going to have fire in the combustion chamber? It canât be filled with water.
Here are 8 arguments against underwater civs. It is probably okay to talk about underwater civs as long as we argue against it.
- Rust argument: Water can react with the metals and undo the smelting. There are also metal oxidising bacteria. It is possible that underwater species would only have acces to metal oxides or other metal compounds such as greigite, which forms the shell of the scaly foot gastropod that lives near the hydrothermal vents
but these donât have metal like properties, they have ionic bonds, not metalic bonds.
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Population argument: The oceans are mostly a desert. Thereâs very little algae living on the surface which supports very little biomass. The lands can support more population because the soil can hold onto the iron, phoshate and ammonia leaching from the rocks whereas this is diluted in the oceans, and these also sink down, primary production is only high in upwelling locations and also in cold waters where the surface water is cold just like the deep waters so those two can mix, bringing nutrients from the depths and moving oxygen from the surface to the depths. And too much primary productivity isnât good either. It causes eutrification which kills the oxygen breathing multicellular life.
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Mining argument: How are they going to mine metals? Can a crab use a pickaxe? Even if it can, why should it even do that? The only livable places are the coasts that are within the photic zone. In these places the ground would be made from sedimentary rocks or sediments such as sand coming from the land due to erosion. They wouldnât be near any ores. Why should they dig down until they find some interesting rocks and try to mix it with thermite?
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Swimming argument: If you are a marine species, you can swim everywhere, so why should you build roads, cities or anything at all?
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Unhelpful settlement argument: The sunlight only penetrates the first 200 meters of the surface. But you can only build a structure on the bottom of the sea. These two are at different places most of the time. Only in shallow waters you see coral reefs for example. That would be the only place where farming can be done and underwater cities can be built. They may be tempted to build floating platforms to get more sunlight for their seaweed farms. Maybe storms would destroy these near-the-sea-surface settlements and this would cause the underwater societies to periodicly collapse, never advancing too much.
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Wood argument: Do they have any material to build anything? On land we have wood because the trees compete with each other to grow the tallest, and they create this wood from glucose. This doesnât happen in water. The bacteria on the sea surface remain unicellular, the only floating multicellular species is the portugese manâo war which is an animal, not a plant. And they can be effected by storms. Jellyfish donât provide good building material anyway like, say, cows do with their leather.
And on the seabed there are coral reefs which are built from calcium carbonate which is just rock. Rock isnât a good material because it is brittle and it breaks easily. Civilisations would presumably also need some materials that can bend such as wood or metals. The aztecs made swords without using metals, they used obsidian, but even then, they inserted the obsidian shards into a wooden stick. There isnât a high technology just made from stone.
- Fire argument: Water can hold onto a lot of heat so heating it up to high temperatures is a lot harder than heating air. They should try to form civilisations without using fire. But they need fire to make the steam engine.
There are two other issues with making fire on water. Water conducts heat very well. On land, you can sit near a campfire and get yourself heated. But if there was a high temperature object in water, if you stayed at the same distance, probably the water around you would also be boiling hot and you wouldnât survive. You couldnât get close to it to throw some metal in there to smelt it. Also if you ever built an engine or if it was given to you, it would be losing a lot of its energy as heat given to the environment. This isnât true for water proof batteries but presumably engines need to be invented before batteries. Heat loss means that they would have a very low efficiency. The third problem is that water becomes a gas if it gets too hot and rises to the surface. Even in the depths of the ocean, you can at most get to a few hundred degrees. The rising steam would be replaced with cold water coming from below and you would be using all that fuel for heating a lot of water by a small amount rather than heating a small amount of water by a large amount. And engine would need to be constructed at a closed environment where all the water can turn into a gas, or they can have air as that gas.
They need to make settlements on the surface if they ever want to have an industrial revolution. But since they arenât amphibious, they canât live on the surface. They are going to make their reverse scuba clothes out of what? Rubber? So a rubber-producing-coral-reef needs to evolve for an underwater civ to be possible? That reduces the chances.
I think the best analog to underwater civs making a surface city is us humans making cities on the moon or the antarctica. It is an uninhabitable place for us but we went there anyway. Can a pre industrial underwater civ make a city on the surface, and make the industrial revolution in that region? Do we expect the few thousand people we have in antarctica to make mining expeditions and invent machines that can only operate in antarctica?
- Situational argument: The industrial revolution that happened on earth required some specific circumstances, and if those circumstances are absolutely needed, then an industrial revolution canât happen underwater.
I first need to explain how fossil fuels form. In oceanic plates, there is no mountain formation. There are mid ocean ridges, but their elevation decreases as the plates move away from each other. So the seabed always remains as the same. There are never sediments coming on top of it and stacking over it, other than in the coastal regions. The oceanic plates get formed, they move, and then they sink below the continental pates, they are always brand new. But the continental plates donât dissapear. They can get higher in some regions if volcanism happens or two continental plates collide and move upwards. After that, the soil and rocks in the high regions erode and they move to the lower regions. If there are organic matter gets buried below this carried sediment, they can turn into fossil fuels.
There are two types of fossil fuels, we can call them petroleum and coal. Petroleum or natural gas can form in any region, even in the sea. It doesnât need to be burried very deep. It is made from carbon and hydrogen. But coal is only made from carbon, if it completely becomes carbon then it is called graphite, there are different coal types that lost different amounts their hydrogen. For coal to form, it needs to be buried very deep, which can only happen on land. Because in very deep places, the temperature gets hot and the bonds between carbon and hydrogen start to break.
Do you know any coal mines near the shore? Perhaps it can exist in shallow waters below the seabed. But it would be in low amounts.
The Greeks and Phonecians built cities near the coasts, and when they expanded, they kept building cities on other coasts.
And then the Romans came and they took all those cities, and they expanded deeper into the land as well.
Perhaps the underwater civ version of this would be that cities would appear near the shore, they would then send colonies and expand to all of the shores, and then a civilisation would invent floating platforms, that would be the Roman equivalent, and it would build cities in the middle of the sea as well.
But unlike abovewater civilisations, underwater civilisations wouldnât have access to coal for the majority of their territory. Even if they dived deep from their floating cities, they could only find petroleum, they canât find coal.
And why is coal important? Because it fueled the industrial revolution in England. In the past, humans were aware of the existance of petroleum, they could burn it or use it for other purposes. But England didnât have petroleum, it had coal. So if the British wanted to burn something other than wood, they had to dig for coal.
But there was a problem. As I said, coal only exists in deep regions. They need to dig deep. But this created a problem. Sometimes, a mine would get flooded, and they couldnât use it anymore. They had to use pumps. This led Thomas Savery to invent the steam engine in 1698. This machine allowed you to burn a fire and use its energy to remove water out of a mine.
This created a positive feedback loop. To get coal from the mines, they needed to use the steam engine, and to use the steam engine, they needed to supply it with coal. The demand for coal increased, so did the demand for engineers that built those engines.
And then they noticed they could use these machines for other purposes as well. For example, a sewing machine sewed clothes 100 times faster than a human working alone. I donât know the exact number. So a few decades later, the industrial revolution happened, and productivity skrocketed. The rest is history.
We may be inclined to think that the industrial revolution was a technologic event. But it was not. It was also an economic event. Many of the inventions associated with it were invented centuries prior, with no revolution accompanying it.
The ancient Romans built a steam engine called the aeolipile that was composed of an enclosed metal sphere filled with water with two exits. When a fire was given from below, the water would boil and it would exit the sphere parallel to the sphere in opposite sides, which would cause it to rotate. But they saw this as a toy, and didnât use it for any practical uses. And mechanical contraptions existed ever since ancient Greece. Every medieval king had a robot they used to entertain themselves with and amaze the commoners or diplomats. The Ottomans used steam power to make kebab machines.
So an invention never guarentees anything.
Similarly, the Incas invented the wheel but they only used it in toys, never for transport. That is because they were in the equator and temperate climate only existed in the mountains, so thats where they lived, which means the terrain they had was very rugged so wheels wouldnât be very useful for them.
And sometimes people can stop using some technologies entirely. After the Roman empire collapsed, the europeans kept using wagons whereas the middle easteners switched to using the camel for transport, which is more useful in the desert climate. But if they only had legs for transportation, they could never invent the automobiles, right? It would be interesting if history developed differently where the middle easteners developed technology in the other fields, and switched from camels to cyborg-camels-with-mecha-suits without ever having an automobile phase.
If Englandâs conditions are required for an industrial revolution, then underwater civs canât happen. That is because no underwater country would be forced to use coal.
And also they wouldnât need any pumps? Because they can just swim and carry whatever they mined to the seabed or the sea surface, wherever their cities are.
We can never know if underwater civs would have an industrial revolution when trying to invent a self propelling boat. But it seems like everything is in favor of terrestrial civs and nothing is in favor of underwater civs. And I think coming up with economic reasons for how could an underwater civ have an industrial revolution should also be made a requirement for anyone arguing in favor of underwater civs, in addition to the other requirements.
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Thatâs a very nice post but letâs just not continue the discussion, there still isnât any new sudden discovery that would make underwater advanced tech possible to ânaturallyâ arise.
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My first Thrivestream Iâll actually be in 
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This is the largest amount of people on the podcast Iâve seen since I started watching them
how to use the discourse reactions in desktop?
