Wait wait wait there’s a Thrive comic?! I learn something new about this project everyday.
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OmnipotentFNarr Wait wait wait there’s a Thrive comic?! I learn something new about this project everyday.
yes…i saw it and it was fun…here’s the link…
http://thrivegame.freeforums.net/thread/304/extremely-bad-thrive-comics
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Great, now I wish @narotiza would finish them. You can’t just leave a comic on a cliffhanger like that, man!
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This thread at this point has nothing to do with the game. The only underwater scenario that actually is going anywhere is my crabs and it is SO specific it’s definitely not being added to the game. This is just me proving that an underwater civ is possible in real life given the right scenario.
Granted this is in a lake rather than the ocean, however I don’t really see that there’s any problems with building with stone underwater.
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It crawled up from hell. If this game is to be known, it needs a quality comic.
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I put 2 hours into this.
This isn’t a bachelor thesis, but I’ve put a lot of thought into this. please don’t ban me
Hydrothermal vents. They’ve been suggested to smelt metal, but here’s the deal. A quick google search revealed they heat up at temperatures upwards of 370°C. Copper melts at a temperature of 1085°C, much higher than that of the vents. Of course, these are Earth numbers. For the vents to even be able to melt copper, the ocean would have to be extremely deep to be near the planets core, which will make it much hotter. Of course, the pressure would be enormous, unless the ocean level also descends with the depth of the vents. First theoretical boundary.
After you get hydrothermal vents that are hot enough to melt copper, you need a creature to get it to melt. Well, believe it or not, there are animals that currently live around hydrothermal vents. Giant tube worms, limpids (sea snail), shrimp and clams are some of the animals that live around the vents. That’s because the vents usually spill out a lot of dissolved chemicals, which fuel the microbial life, which in turn fuel the animals. I found out through my research that hyperthermophiles (beings that thrive in high heat) have a cell structure that contains more saturated fatty acids (although a citation was missing, so this may not be 100% accurate), although they were all unicellular. So if a creature like that evolved around a hydrothermal vent, it would be advantageous for it to keep this trait, because of the abundance of nutrients, although the possibility of that is up for discussion. I’m no biologist after all. Second theoretical boundary.
This brings me to my next point: primitive tools. This point actually favours the vents, since they usually form massive exploitable deposits, so, in theory, if a creature could manage to somehow smelt and mold the metal, getting it wouldn’t be a problem. This also means making primitive stone tools wouldn’t necessarily require smelting from the start, as you just need to find a sharp piece of stone to cut down seaweed or coral or sea trees, which you can use for early shelters. Building underwater huts has already been discussed and the general consensus was that it was easy underwater, so I’ll skip over that. Now, you have your tribe of fish people (possibly with high heat-resistant skin, but not confirmed), with basic stone tools, going around prodding other fish to eat instead of using their mouth. This means they also developed some sort of prehension member, which may have evolved from their tail, or their fins (just speculation, underwater creatures aren’t just limited to Earth fish designs), to grab the tools. This means the underwater civilians must have a prehensile member to become a proper society. Third theoretical boundary.
You might wonder, why would they decide to approach the vents to smelt metal? Well, at a stretch, it might be an accidental discovery, like agriculture or Penicillin. A fish might have swam around, found a rock, and decided to chuck it at the vent, and see the rock start bubbling. Curious, it watches the rock, and it sees it slowly melting and dissolving into the water, to cool into tiny mineral deposits. They start experimenting with which rocks melt how quickly, and how to differentiate each rock. Then, they will make crude moulds out of the rocks that take the longest to melt (or don’t melt at all, catching them back when they’re expelled), and suspend them over the vent, around the area where the metal starts cooling, so that they can force the metal into constant contact with the vent, eventually melting, wherein they will remove the mould from the area and cover the metal so it may cool into the piece, their first man-made shape. Why would they do that? Well, why did we start melting rocks and then moulding them? Experimentation and curiosity. We saw that different metals were good at different things, so through testing, we melted the metals into specific shapes. So, metallurgy would have to be accidental at best. Fourth theoretical boundary.
OK, you melted metal and advanced a lot. How will you industrialise? We had lots of coal-powered steam machines, but fire won’t work underwater. That’s where currents come in. It’s like a water mill, except it’s more accessible and less constraint to location. They can just build propeller that will turn the machine. Simple, renewable and clean. If you don’t like that solution, back to the vents. The water is already boiling, you just need a means for the current to evacuate once the piston is pushed up, and give it enough time to come back down before the next wave. Of course, industrialisation occurs, factories everywhere, population explosion due to better living conditions, and no coal mines! What’s missing? Electricity. Unfortunately, being underwater means there’s no wiring possible without endangering everyone swimming around, unless you insulate everything from the beginning. Assuming the fish discover electricity (maybe through a deadly experiment), how would they generate it? Back to the propellers. Using an alternator, they can transform the kinetic energy generated by the water turbine into electric energy, giving electricity to everyone!
You have the power of electricity at your fingertips, but what’s next? Land! You need to develop land colonisation before thinking about space. Why? Resources will probably start running low by now, and land is still fresh and full of resources. You build a pressure suit for your colonisers, and you build a land vehicle to get you from water to land, and you start colonising. Once you’ve mastered land, pressure suits will be useful for the next frontier: SPACE. Since you can establish infrastructure on land, you can start populating it, building mainly with giant construction vehicles to do the heavy lifting for the Giant walls encasing the city to get pumped full of water for the inhabitants. Then, you’ll build a rocket platform, and rocket into space.
In conclusion, I think I gave fair points in regard to some glaring plot holes of founding an underwater civilisation (tell me if I missed some). I breezed through the whole industrial-space part, because I was getting kind of bored and no one discussed it, so I ran out of ideas. My verdict: It’s possible, but highly convoluted and too reliant on specific events to be common. In your entire playthrough, I don’t know if you could ever find an auto-evo underwater civ, because it’s just so much easier on land.
What are your thoughts? Did I get anything wrong? Do you have anything to add? Do you want to fight me IRL?
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Like.
I like the idea of pressurized suits, I’ve never thought of how hard it would be for deep sea creatures to visit land. An example of this is how hard it is to get deep sea animals in aquariums because they die almost immediately.
Once a submarine civilization establishes colonies above water, it’s likely that technology would develop at higher speeds, due to electricity not being explicitly dangerous above water.
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You can make electricity safe underwater by properly insulating the conducting components. If metal was scarce, salt water surrounded by whatever insulator is convenient could be used.
I’d like to point out that LAWK is unlikely to be possible above 200 C because the molecules that make it up actually break down at that point. Would a 1000 C hydrothermal vent be approachable? Maybe creatures could wear insulating suits to go near them for short stretches if not, but that adds another hurtle. Melting metals isn’t the only problem of metallurgy; creating sufficiently reducing conditions to strip the non-metallic components of ore out is also necessary. It’s not entirely clear to me how possible that would be.
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To throw another issue into the mix there are metals which you can find in native form (not oxides). This video is of a guy just finding a piece of copper and cold working it into a tool.
So I imagine an underwater civ would have access to some metal tools. However it wouldn’t be enough to make it to the bronze age.
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oh shit this could actually work a bit further than we thought
From: All tomorows
Tool Breeders (Descendants of the Swimmers)
They used to be simple creatures, descendants of a battered people that had taken to the sea. Their remote sapiens ancestors would have given such beings no chance of a sentient comeback, for they thought that technological advances were impossible in the fluid medium of the oceans. But the Swimmers disproved such predictions by founding one of the most advanced and most outrageously alien cultures of the entire human lineage.
Fire, the cornerstone of industrial engineering, was almost impossible to sustain and use underwater. But the Breeders simply choose another path when complex toolmaking proved impracticable. They began to breed their tools and machines for them.
It had started long before the species was even intelligent. In the endless variety of life in the seas, the Swimmers always adopted and controlled the organisms that were useful in some way. Once domesticated, these creatures were willingly or unintentionally modified through artificial selection and conditioning. The process was slow, but once underway, its effects were formidable.
A modern city of the Breeders was a sight to behold. Huge, heart-like creatures pumped out nutritious fluids to a network of self-repairing, living conduits. This was their equivalent of a power grid, and it reached every single one of the Breeders� huge, exoskeletal dwellings; �powering� bioluminescent lights, flickering cephalopod skin-televisions, medicinal sea-squirts and countless other devices that had been bred from living creatures. The advances in biology had risen exponentially, until genetic engineering was completely mastered. Modern Breeders did not even need to use animals; a simple manipulation of cultured tissues and stem-cells could give solutions to any problem at hand.
The mastery of genetics had conquered many obstacles. The yawning ocean depths, as well as the Planet�s few tiny landmasses were now firmly within the Breeders� grasp. However, they were not contempt with mere planetary dreams. New forms and bizarre creatures were still being developed, in daring attempts to conquer the one realm that was most hostile to life.
Sealed in their living ships, the Breeders wished to return to the stars.
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What if a planet had enough oxygen that the water could support a fire the same as air can on earth?
Not possible due to their different properties. Water cannot support fire regardless of how much oxygen is dissolved into it BECAUSE water is the solvent, thus it retains its main characteristics. Oxygen, in that case, is the solute, which doesn’t affect most of water’s properties (except at conducting electricity if the solute was a mineral).
OK, but what about just using a normal smelting furnace with air from some source, like a cave of nonporous rock that passes the ocean?
And how would they reach that without filling it with water? Please, even more so when it comes to the topic that is Underwater Civilizations, try to completely think your ideas through, and not just mention something anyone taking high school in chemistry can debunk.
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If we assume that the creatures can survive out of water without dying immediately, and had access to valves and seals, they could:
Find a cave exposed to water
Build a seal over it
Dig into the air cave
Build the smelter in the water cave
Remove the water cave seal
Then, they would have an underwater smelter.
Ah the community forums!
You know, usually the deal breaker in these arguments isn’t just the how, but the why. Why would they intentionally make an area inhospitable? Why would they build a smelter? Why would they toss rocks into said smelter?
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The same question could apply to human civilization too. Why have we discovered smelting and forging? Most likely because of an accident. Tribal creatures don’t know methodology or science. They discover techniques or technology by accident.
Now things have changed because we are more advanced, so we can actually use methodology to discover new things. However, the rules underwater are different making it difficult to imagine an underwater civilization.
Personally, the only way I imagine it is that a more advanced species like spacefaring humans coming from elsewhere arrive and help them with their own technology. Nonetheless, this thread is about how and why there could be an underwater civilization without the help of a more advanced species.