how would that make any sense
Isn’t that already the plan? (At least until someone figures out how to preform metal working underwater)
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Well i didn’t know that
I am emerging once again to say that I actually was working on a paper detailing everything from the chemical composition of the planet, geological activity, the evolution of both the focus species but all the primary ecosystem they evolved in to justify the various niches and adaptations on display.
Now I’m pretty sure fish people are out of the question, my researched focused mostly on deep sea crustacean civilization forming from an extremely volcanically active planet with a (compared to Earth) high composition of silicon.
This could be changed to science topic really because I dont expect underwater civilizations to be in the game but the general question of “if they are possible” is one I’m still firmly on yes for, but under a ludicrously specific set of circumstances that’s I’ve tried to find. If you are intrigued I could go into detail but I’ve stopped all research because if was WAY too much research for a purely hypothetical fictional scenario.
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Are you going with the asssumption they need to discover metalworking first?Because you dont really need it for some technologies such as sailing,or animal domestication.
“but under a ludicrously specific set of circumstances that’s I’ve tried to find”
How ludicrous.Our life is pretty ludicrous when looking at the rest of the universe.
Yes i get it,you need metalworking for techs in OUR tech tree,but theres really no way of knowing at first glance what tech tree an aquatic civ based on primitive bioengineering(domestication) can have for example.
Not to mention domesticating species similar to electric eels and scaly foot gastropods can help with discovering manufacturing and metalworking massively.
I dont think we should exclude hypothetical research trees if they have sound basis in reality.
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But to get tech you have to have access to stone(but this is abundant everywhere and in the ocean it’s even more abundant…)
SO then stone age is not really a problem for an underwater civ.Which would inevitably lead to domestication.
bioengineering and domestication aren’t the same thing, also bioengineering takes too much time and undiserated characteristics can emerge from it too.
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Domestication WOULD lead to selective breeding.
You dont consider the selective breeding a sort of bioengineering?Its how our domestic animals and especially how german shepards came to be.Imagine giving this thousand or millions of years.NO way of telling what they might breed for what purpuse.
regardless if you consider it or not it would help massively with tech and i think a more important factor of tech development would be language, not fire tbh.
if you do it for millions of years is totally possible that: the sapient species goes extinct, the bioengineering has an indesiderated effect, they just stop bioengineering(because it doesn’t give them any immediate advantage), they forget for what purpose they were bioengineering them for, the sapient species just becomes another species.
" the bioengineering has an indesiderated effect, they just stop bioengineering(because it doesn’t give them any immediate advantage),"
I think those are simillar.WE never stoped selective breeding.Why would aquatic selective breeding be differente from land based one?
"the sapient species goes extinct"This would be applied to any land based species too.
Your whole argument could be applied to fire since it haa been discovered millions of years ago.Why would it be applied to herding and not to fire?Since it hasnt been applied to us clearly.
?
Unless you can somehow explain how this allows advanced technology to me, underwater civs are still stuck in the stone age (which has never been the point of debate so it is useless to discuss about that, what the underwater civs talk is all about is getting out of the stone age).
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Breeding animals to eventually become tools.Basically breeding tools.Or to have a function similar to tools or creation of tools.Electric eels and scaly foot gastrobods being prime candidates for such things.
So this whole discussion is about finding the metalwork tech?Even so bio-tools WILL help with its discovery massively.Not to mention using the scaly foot gastropod is already a form of metal working.
Yes, but advancing technologically is much faster than bioengineering.
because WE do it for commercial use, not pratical one, also how would a sapient species that doesn’t know what evolution or genes or mutations are think “yes, I can make this animal mutate to do what I want”, and don’t say “WE DID IT”, because when we did it, we just selected the more docile ones, you are talking about making an entire organism take the place of technology througt selective breeding.
You could also modify your own species to fulfill those needs…
(at least before becoming too advanced as the editor time skips get shorter as you advance so you can make fewer changes)
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Isnt the commerical use a practical one?We still did it 11 k years ago and we didnt know what evolution and genes are.Just like we did with docility they could do with scaly gastropods and electric eels.Based on amount of current and metal plating.We also did it to german shepards based on certain traits before evolution was widely accepted.It doenst take tech to know that breeding certain animals with certain traits will eventually create something with those traits more pronounced.
Remember fire has been around for 1000 times longer than domestication.You cant really compare them and i could apply the same logic to fire.
I’d like to expand on Cth2004 idea of using lenses. While glass is useful, it wouldn’t be very usable for an aquatic stone-age society. But, a lens does not have to be made of glass: It could also be made of organic material, just like the lenses in our eyes. While a single organic lens couldn’t create useful temperatures, for obvious reasons, it’s not impossible that a series of multiple lenses could be put together into a usable solar smelter
why would they care about electric current or metal plating?
Also when did I ever compare fire and domestication? I said that technology advances faster than bioengineering, so stop with your strawman.