Right now we’re working on an essay that by this point might just devolve into a research paper if I have my way and the other two don’t reign me in lol.
A bit of a spoiler, but right now we have three sections - hurdles that an aquatic civ would need to face, their general direction of technological development, and what size/type of world would actually be required. I’m hoping to prove in the last one we are, by limiting ourselves to primarily terrestrial planets, are missing out on a pretty decent subset of habitable worlds. Granted, that needs actual proof, so research papers ho, but I digress.
To a person who is new and is trying to get started on this topic.
" Hmm, underwater civ interesting …, ok let`s read this and get up to date 482 replies! "
Deathwake
(i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)
494
Wait there’s only 400-something? I would have thought 14 hundred or more. Huh.
As someone who went dredging through for collate info for the essay, I have this to say:
Good news, there is a lot of repetition.
Bad news, there is an excessive amount of repetition.
I would make a master list, but to be honest… I skimmed a lot of the threads.
So, disclaimer first, I still highly doubt that aquatic industrial/spacefaring civs are possible, and, even then, I’d still rank them pretty low on our priority list for Thrive.
However, I just got word from a vegetalist (scientist specialized in plant study) that cellulose was known to be as hard and light (if not more) than steel, and could especially potentially be manipulated without the development of metal forging.
This was a quick exchange at a conference, so I can not further develop about it, but I thought this lead would perhaps be of interest to people thinking about aquatic civs (because, again, my opposition to them is based on our current scientific knowledge --and programming constraints, and is not ideological).
Now, of course, one would still need to find a way to develop mesoscopic pure cellulose structures underwater without metal working…
sci0927
(is nice ...as long as you refer to me using she/they pronouns)
499
nothing stops limbs from being above water while the main part of the creature is underwater
what i mean is:
Those sticks/stones/whatever would be wet anyways, so no sparks, let alone flames, would arise from this.
Moreover, say a fire was made. Then what? Will the fish just hold it above the water indefinitely? Building a floating platform smithy that would stay afloat with all the heavy stones AND fuel necessary to stoke a fire long enough to smelt metal would be inconveniently large, and not something a species trying to survive would waste a tonne of resources building with no obvious logical recompense.
You might as well suggest amphibians, which has never been the point of debate. You can perfectly fine go on land for a bit to smelt the metals but live underwater the rest of the time. This thread is purely about entirely aquatic species.
I do also get a sense of deja vu each time I’m force to post here. It’s almost as if the underwater civilizations talk never progresses. I guess that is the underwater civs curse.
Most people who try and point out all of the previously disproven ideas are often just new and haven’t fully read through this discussion. i do find it interesting how there is so much discussion about this topic, where all that it really comes down to is if the devs decide whether or not to allow it.
I have another idea about how to get fire in the sea: Build the smelter inside another organism
This method will require some specific and unlikely adaptations on the part of the host, but I think it could exist. Specifically, it would need a structure like a cephalopod shell, or a pneumatophore, which would hold oxygen. It would also, quite paradoxically, need this structure to be exposed to the surroundings by ducts. It (both organ and organism) would also need to be very large, and resistant to fire and heat
But there is a way this could evolve: Fire breath. This animal could have adapted some sort of poison, alongside excess lungs, into some sort of fiery weapon based on spraying burning gas into the water. It seems plausible to me, and it would also serve as a fuel source, at least for some applications
TL:DR Underwater civs could smelt ores by climbing into a giant dragon’s lungs
Forging isn’t about having access to fire, but having access to a stable fire at a high temperature for a long enough time to actually be able to forge the item, while keeping the temperature of this item high enough for a long enough time again to be able to forge it.
Your dragon would probably die pretty soon if it had hot enough fire in it, and, even if you were able to keep your metal within the ascending bubble for long enough for it to heat, you’d cool it very fast when it would touch water again (that’s how you cool metal IRL, related to some heat transmission properties of water vs air I guess). So you wouldn’t have time to forge it.
The heat from fire doesn’t seem to actually be that deadly. For example, a campfire, at 600°C, is comfortable to be around just a metre away. A smelter only needs to be a little more than twice as hot as a campfire to melt iron (and it could even be colder than that to start)
