The point isn’t to just straight up make a smelter just simply because they mined methane-oxygen pockets in ice. I am asking if it has been discussed. Also the fact of a furnace occurring underwater has been spoke about before and has found the problem of managing pressure, so the flow of waste air has to be a greater pressure than the water or have a funnel/pipe leave the water.
Yes this has been discussed. We concluded that while it was possible it was improbable that a civilization without metallurgy would invest in something so hard.
What about Greek Fire? Couldn’t it burn underwater?
It could ignite in contact of water, but it couldn’t burn underwater
1 Like
It’s also pretty weird for a creature to invest in anything hot and painful at all and try putting different things in it.
There’s a pretty big gap in complexity between tossing things in a fire and building a dry chamber with precise airflow to keep a fire ignited, which underwater creatures somehow know about
1 Like
That’s been said before, but the what ifs degrade in the immense branching of events in different circumstances and environments, so these gaps are negligible as long as possible. It’s like the conundrum of humanoid aliens. It is ignorant to assume all outer aliens would have green skin and converge into apes, but it isn’t impossible for them to appear, just very improbable. Even if statistically only 1 humanoid came out on every 1000 planets, that would mean 500,000 in our milky way if life only spawned in the potential planets in their habitable zones. The certain situations and behaviours that cause certain discoveries are always going to be uncertain and just because something is weird to occur to us by logic, doesn’t exclude it out completely. There a loads of cases of lucky events and situations that enabled us to discover some weird things like penicillin and flint and steel. We can say some of these aquatic animals were playing near the surface and trying out different ways to open the hollow ice balls filled with the methane and oxygen, cracked one open, and detected the stench of methane. This odd occurrence and detection would spark a curiosity in their stone age minds to find out more of these gas pockets.
2 Likes
I love your attitude of chance and whatnot, amd I agree with you, but I think there have been so many ideas in this thread that it has become kinda pointless.
2 Likes
As pointless as they were, a small selection has proven to be stable and possible somehow, and this thread is a fun and interesting to talk in.
Yeah, it’s still fun, it’s just a little hard to get around the sheer number of ideas that have been discussed.
Same with literally all of the community forums to be honest
1 Like
It seems to me that the main issue with fully submerged smelters is the incompatibility between the environment forcing air to be sealed away, and the smelter’s requirements for air to be continuously pumped. While the first problem seems unsolvable, what about the second problem? Is there a way to smelt decent metal in standing air? It would probably require a high oxygen and high pressure atmosphere, but that doesn’t seem impossible to produce, especially with the right fauna to produce the oxygen
1 Like
Maybe, but the main problem with that strategy is how quickly smelting burns up o2. And it is fast. Unless you have cubit hectares of air you would wind up having your fire smother itself before you got much done.
And this is leaving out the first problem entirely.
Anyways I’m happy that you posted this thread was way too dead for such a cool topic.
I’ve realized a rather simple way that air could be kept underwater without seals: It seems that most animals have the same pressure as the surroundings, and are uniform in pressure. This is because animals are connected to the outside by gills and stomachs and such, and so if there is more pressure outside, then the animal will be compressed and filled to match the outside pressure. This will also apply to the air-spaces, meaning that any bio-air extracted will be at environmental pressures, and so could easily be kept with a simple dome. This means that a smelter could easily be made in a dome, which could be filled with pre-pressurized bio-air, and then during smelting, more air could be added, with the excess air being forced down into the water. This last stage will probably be the sticking point, as it is plausible that the surface may not be able to extract air at the rate it must be added, and using a pump may not be feasible due to the temperatures. Furthermore, there is the issue of the pressure increasing in the dome due to the heat, which may also provide an obstacle to this design
I acctually love this idea, though it would be terrifically hard to insert new oxygen (and yes it would be pure oxygen with a high humidity sinse not only is most “bio-air” pure oxygen sometimes with co2 but pure o2 is just about the best air mix to smelt with) at a pace fast enough to appease even modest smelting, requiring either highly advance pipes or a few thousand fish with full swim bladders and a 100 or so workers to debladder them at industrial speeds.
Que me coming up with an wack and novel solution no one would ever use. Since neither one of these is favorable I think the best bet is whales. Or any secondarily aquatic megafaunal specimens; giant seals, larger icthiosours, or even whale sized diving bell spiders, actually those would be best. These beasts would swim up to the surface, gulping up air and schools of fish, then down to the seafloor and blowing air into the dome, while looking fish for the dozen or so industrial debladderers to debladder for more air. This would prolly never work but whatever, sanity is boring anyways.
Most likely they would just build a bigger dome and connect it to an air supply with simple pipes.
1 Like
The problem with whales is that they are full of regular air. A creature containing an air-space (which would be more like a nautilus shell than a swim-bladder) could have any sort of gas in its body, including a high (or even almost pure) oxygen mix
Yes, though a a swim bladder is usually already filled with high oxygen concentration air, so a bony fish the size of a whale would work best I guess
If the air can be kept around the smelter itself, there’s no reason it couldn’t be stored for a smelting session, which means that it would probably be easier to catch and store the air of many small fish rather than a single big fish
1 Like
well yeah i guess that makes sense.
Honestly i dont get people saying talking about the plausability of descovering certain constructs,are we simulating the intelligence of the creatures too?this wouldnt even be a game but a real evolution simulator.
If an environment selects a species for more intelligence you could get underwater species with the average IQ of 160 and then discovering such constructs is a piece of cake.What if we gave more time to squids and dolphins?They are already pretty close to us in terms of intelligence.
My opinion is that we shouldnt concern with the plausability of discovery of technology but if the technology is possible in that environment.
Was the metal smelting in vents debunked even if you consider the more malleable metals like tin???