Excuse me everyone for the double post, the two replies at a time make it harder for me not two without awkwardly bunching these up. Continuing on…
This does not refute my claim either as impossible, and you didn’t really add argument or unit as to why it would be harder since just as there are convinces from going from land to the bottom of the sea, there are also convinces of going from the bottom of the sea to land. I would not say that it is not more difficult, it is definite that in a lot of aspects it would be. For example, the cause of first containing the water with necessary conditions to keep whatever species alive, the water may have to be well pressurised as so the creature does not bloat from the lack of pressure applied, and all that weight being carried all the way to land as water is heavy and I imagine it’d be hard to move up on land when accustomed to the sea. These are definite engineering challenges that would make this extremely hard, but most of these may be mitigated by circumstance limiting this being called “impossible”. Certain variables at play that can effect how easy this can be are things such as:
How deep is their habitat?
How much and what do they require to live in their water environment?
How well is their normal build able to adapt to being in different conditions such as land (not stating they are amphibious, but perhaps more resilient to pressure and temperature changes and can survive on low amounts of the things needed to keep them alive for short periods)
What are the materials and life around them like and how well would they fare in different schematics and designs?
A material is of course needed to make anything, but this again just brings us back to “perhaps they do not need metal specifically”. I am confident that rocks and rope would not be their best feats of materials there, you are disregarding all the life around them and differing formations. What they would need might be metal, but it might be something else depending on what is brought to them and what the design is.
Deathwake
(i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)
452
I agree. Think the Inca or Aztecs. They were huge culturally and even to a point technologically advanced empires with stone age materials. They didn’t even have any domestic animals other than alpacas. Imagine if no one had metal tech and could invade them and they had tons of domesticated animals and plants. (And lived underwater) Sooner or later they would get to the point where they could have scientific research in earnest, and once they discover atoms they will find that iron ores have some of the same atoms as meteoric iron, which is pure iron like that used inmost iron things, just naturally occurring. By this point I’m sure they would know how to heat something up and so would try that to test the ores heat resistance. After concluding that the ore was weak and half melted after a while some grad student working as an intern at the lab to clean up after them will want to preform the same tests on the pig iron that dripped out of the ore, and they will find that it was slightly harder and then the drippings from that will be tested and it will be found to be super hard and not brittle. It would probably not be economical to mass produce, but all it needs to do is make their rockets, as everything else can be done without metal, though computers could be easier with it. This is only one scenario, and in most worlds these people would have died off, or stayed hunter-gatherers until some mass extinction, or get stuck in stone age middle ages until a land based intelligence evolves, but it doesn’t need to be easy. It just needs to be possible.
How do they discover this without any way of observing or comparing atoms?
Deathwake
(i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)
454
Well we couldn’t detect atoms, once we had enough surplus to have science we figured it out pretty quick, and they wouldn’t even have to, they could just test iron ore for no other reason than that testing stuff is cool
That’s not how smelting works.That’s not putting it on a mild fire and waiting for it to cook. The ore simply won’t smelt before reaching a temperature or several hundred degrees, or over a thousand depending on the precise ore. Your civ would need to not simply heat things, but to pull off a temperature high enough to do this. In the water.
I won’t repeat what was already said above: in a nutshell, either you won’t do anything to the ore, or you’ll smelt the intern alongside with it.
No, computers would not be easier with metal, they would be possible. You cannot make a computer without metal, unless you don’t need to actually use it for real-world computations. Sloweness and imprecisions would be too great to be of any use, actually.
What kind of surplus did we need to have “science” (modern one at least) ? It definitely includes precise instruments. And how do we do precise instruments? With metal, because all other materials are not efficient enough.
Note that we also use a lot of glass (lenses…), and that glass-working is pretty similar to ore-smelting.
Deathwake
(i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)
456
I didn’t mean a cooking fire, I meant incredibly powerful tools like electrical heating or thermite or a fire based kiln that is operated by lifting a donut shaped bathtub full of researchers up above water, around this kiln. They could develop these for any number of reasons but all can be done without metal.
Computers can be made reasonably fast without metal, but we won’t have to invent them until after we invent metal so it doesn’t matter.
By surplus I meant the ability to transcend subsistence farming, allowing for large populations in cities and people so rich they need something to do with their time. (In the modern day of 40 hour work weeks and weekends of a lower middle class person is in this position to a degree, but until as recently as the 20th century 72 hour work weeks and only a single [or no] days off was common.) This by no means requires metal, as there are many ways to create this surplus, it’s really just matter of time. As for insterments, most can be made without metal. It may be incredibly hard without metal, but it doesn’t have to be easy. Just possible. For those few that kinda do really need metal, like compasses, naturally occurring loadstones and meteoric iron should do the trick. Or just domesticate a shark. They’re pretty much living compasses. On a world where nothing has a sense of smell some modern society might spend billions developing smelling machines to look for drugs and explosives in a search instead of spending mere millions on training bloodhounds.
As for lens crafting, that’s a great reason to invent some high temperature heating system.
Do you think researchers are just random people with week-end hobbies? Full-time researchers have not waited for 40 days week and paid holidays.
Also, subsistence farming essentially disappeared during the 19th century… so after the dawn of the atomic theory.
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by “reasonably fast”. How many flops does it amount to? And especially which mechanical computer achieves this?
I think you don’t realize how crazy science instruments are. I’ve used instruments so precise that touching them with my hand would make them become useless, because they are designed to the nanometer and beyond. You can not do this with any material but metal. That would not be hard, but impossible.
Deathwake
(i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)
458
1: the original researchers in the victorian era were. You need it to be a hobby first, and without the resources for hobbies how would your civilization afford to pay full time researchers? And as for the transcending subsistence farming, I meant two things, when mercantile economies are enabled (age of discovery) and the first hobby researchers and secondly once regulated capitalism wins and working your workers until their death goes out of fashion and demand for industry improving research goes up enough for researchers who don’t have endless money to become a thing.
2: if you’re just trying to outpace humans electrically powered mechanical setups are orders of magnitude faster, not nearly fast enough for video games or massive organizational computing, let alone the internet or the amount of data processing needed to research black holes. All this needs to do is plug the hole until metal tech becomes widespread enough for digital computers, and these could hold their ground for a while, as with further research beating ENIAC should be a breeze and could hold out for another decade at least.
3: are the ones that are needed to plug the gap until metal insterments that sensitive? And even if they are quite sensitive metal doesn’t have the magical power to make things immune to randomly messing up due to environmental factors, so at least the basics can be made without metal, and anything super sensitive will have to wait for metal to be widespread.
1 . Many were, but most of the great figures of late 18th-early 19th century were university professors. There was a surge of specialized science schools at the time (only in France, you had the Ecole des Mines, the Ecoles des Ponts-et-Chaussées, the Ecole the Ecole Polytechnique, the Ecole Normale Supérieure), which did not include all the existing universities like la Sorbonne which were already shifting to science. Granted, it was still pretty much for rich people, because everything was anyways.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that food abundance did not help, of course it does! Because you can devote much more to science. But science did not wait for it to happen: you can trace science back to much earlier time. Pline (senior) did live in the Roman Era, and still brought a remarkable compilation of scientific knowledge of the time.
What really was the backbone of this science boom was the birth of the scientific methodology, which took place with the Enlightenment, the encyclopedias and was established at the end of the 18th century (Lavoisier is a great example of this). But early traces can be find with Galileo, Newton or Copernicus.
But anyways, we’re going off tracks here haha
How do you electrically power something without metal? And your assumption that mechanical computers can beat ENIAC in speed is already not backed by any evidence: non-metallic materials are prone to break (which means regular failures requiring intervention - even ENIAC failed every 2 days on average), and without metal you can’t have precisely cut mechanical parts - which means you may have an answer, but you better not need it to be precise.
Let’s take a very basic case: weighing things. How do you weigh something? You compare it to another weight. Now, let’s make a balance: you put some bar on equilibrium over something, and add the weights to the bar (with possible compartiments to hold it).
What I’m saying is: if you don’t have metal, you don’t have something light and solid enough to measure most weights. Either your bar will break, or it will be so heavy that you simply can’t move it with light weights.
Let’s talk about standards: as discussed already, the successes of science came from modern methodology, which relies on standards. You may have heard that in 200 years, we were already having problems with the kilogram standard becoming lighter and lighter over time. And this was conserved in air! Now, put any kind of rock or whatever in the water: you’ll have it eroded pretty quick, at least enough to alter its standard quality. And I’m not mentioning the organic matter that could develop on it… note that here, the issue is also related to water as it contains organic matter, so it’s not only materials
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Deathwake
(i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)
460
1: sure, you win. It doesn’t really put a hole in my ideas.
2: umm, why not plastics? Tough plastics could handle most mechanical stresses. As for the electric thing you could literally use water instead of wires. Your computer could be suspended in a non-conductive fluid and only allow water in parts that would normally have wires. It’d be huge, and breakable, but not impossible. Also how fast was ENIAC? I’m not sure.
3: build your small scales out of plastic and your large ones out of stone, and your standard weights out of meteoric iron or loadstone. Metal isn’t completely off the table. Or better yet evolve to be able to tell the density of a homologous object by licking it and just throw it into a bucket above water to test it’s volume and by extension it’s mass.
Aren’t those even harder to make? Otherwise we would have moved to those ages ago instead of continuing to rely on oil for plastics (only now I think we have a few plant derived plastics out there).
Deathwake
(i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)
464
What about celluloid? I’m prolly being super wrong, but isn’t it plant based or something? Please try to disprove this I have done literally 0 research.
Couldn’t find a very up to date number, but wikipedia says
" As of 2014, bioplastics represented approximately 0.2% of the global polymer market (300 million tons).[1]Although bioplastics are not commercially significant, research continues on this topic.[2]"
So even in 2014 when we had used plastics for a long time, manufacturers hadn’t moved to plant based plastics. I doubt the number is more than 10 times higher even now (so less than 10%).
where the production of bioplastics is much lower than biodegradable (which AFAIK are oil based plastics), even for 2025 they forecast that bioplastics (plant based plastics) will be much lower than fossil fuel derived plastics.
Actually I just noticed this on that page: “Currently, bioplastics represent about one percent of the more than 368 million tonnes of plastic produced annually*. But as demand is rising, and with more sophisticated biopolymers, applications, and products emerging, the market for bioplastics is continuously growing and diversifying.” so assuming that is up to date, 99% of plastic is not plant based. I think this shows that at least it is from a market perspective harder to make large profits with bioplastics, which isn’t exactly guaranteed but I’d claim that this shows they are harder to make than normal plastics, otherwise they would be a bigger part of the global plastics market.
This is a very underwater civs thing to do: an idea is suggested, someone says it is not possible, then an even unlikelier idea is suggested to replace the original idea.
Deathwake
(i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)
466
The first nitrocellulose was made in the 1800s, and if I really need to throw out the weird ideas, why not bone? Bone is a great building material and can handle some of the same stresses as metal, and therefore a well carved megalfaunal rib or such could work well for a scale of any size.
With bone, we are back to the “re-invent the entire tech tree to avoid n number of problematic techs for underwater civs”
Deathwake
(i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)
468
Nah, just allow for different materials to be used, and it isn’t just for underwater civs, a land based or amphibious civ controlled by a crazed culturebuilder like myself could benefit by being allowed to have their people have taboos against given materials in given roles, and a given planet might have a ultrastrong organic material that is common while another night totally lack stiff tissues in its tree analogues, so it’s just letting the game engine have wiggle room.