You do not understand the way of meltel the smeltle.
no, but I do have knowledge of chill le meatl
P-pipe it? Pipe freaking lava miles though frozen seawater with stone age tech? If no one responds I’ll have to double post when I finish researching aquatic ferovolcanism.
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There’s an edit button ya know
Yeah but that doesn’t notify everyone rudely.
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as in use lava tubes
Lava tubes are naturally occurring things that don’t contain ferromagma to my knowledge you can’t just pipe them to where you can cool it down safely.
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lava tubes are tubes that held lava, but are now inactive, I mean the active ones with molten magma flowing through them
Knowledge is saying that this planets lava is high in metal, and so any lava tube that has formed is one containing metallic heavy lava
Not saying I think it is plausible, but if you have a place somewhere down the pipe you might be able to find a way too cool it off, if you didn’t boil yourself alive and had some way to section off magma for cooling
ya we in cold water w/ no sun, so it cold down here, have a blanket
…so you want to luck out and find lava tubes that have an active (spicificly ferrovolcanic) volcano on one end and somewhere forging is possible (oil is good for this) and then, then you have to DRAIN IT OF WATER- like just think, what would happen if you didn’t? Not fun.
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this is not possibility it feasibility
How is that feasible?
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Okay, so I had an idea that hadn’t been discussed before. Hydrothe——
No, in all seriousness I was thinking about pistol shrimp, more specifically their defense mechanism, a claw like structure with a rapid snapping motion that superheats the water - according to multiple articles I have read - to as hot as the surface of the sun. (Not sure how it doesn’t evaporate, the heat must be extremely short lasted?)
Now, my thought was what if a sophont developed with a similar defense mechanism as to the pistol shrimp, or alongside and animal with such a defense mechanism? Like a gun, it would push the heat away from the organism, and chances are accidental firing of this could happen near exposed metals or metallic structures (similar to - or maybe in tandem with - the scaly-foot snail-like idea?). The heat would be plenty to melt the metal. And this would negate the requirement for actual fire or the fuel predicament we currently find ourselves in (both lessening amount of fuel and global warming).
Now, here are where I see a few issues. First, I don’t know enough about metals to say whether or not the probably brief amount of superheating would allow for the melting of the metal. Second, I am unsure if the metal would remain malleable for a long enough period of time to be shaped using stones tools if the metal did melt. And third, I am unsure what impurities smelting within water could introduce to the metal.
Any feedback on this idea? Solutions to the above problems or other issues you see with this idea? Constructive criticism is appreciated!
the problem is its short lasting energy, and you can’t get it to not dissipate because water is an essential part of the process. This is even more problematic with the shaping, even with this mechanism, the area heated will not be enough, due to the range it needs, for you can’t punch it, for that would injure yourself. Even the amount of superheated water is pitiful, not even close to the required amount to make a metal malleable, the only metal would probably be gallium, that you could shape in reason, but to attain such a pure form would be immensely difficult, not to mention its limited practice use, you best shot is most likely lead, for its melting point. Still that leads us to the amount of heat that is produced from this mechanism, even if it heats water enough for it to be categorized as almost sun level, (surface) the volume of such water is not large enough to melt water, since in smithing you need a constant heat source, instead of a large high blast of heat, like a blowtorch on a marshmallow, if you do it for a second it melts, but for 1/8 a second and less, it does minimal damage. Also, let’s say you impractically evolved some super shrimp the size of an adult male, human. the amount of energy required for that original feet explodes exponentially, not to mention the inefficiency of this method, imagine your left hand was a gun and your right hand was a hammer, biological machinery for complex organisms is highly impractical, almost absurd. Concludingly, even if you were able to produce a large enough amount of water, you would still need to do it constantly. While this mainly went over what you yourself saw, I believe this is enough to change your mind. Biological machinery is an incomplete idea, semi-possible, and not practical.
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This is not enough to completely dissuade me from the topic, but you are correct that it further reinforces my points against it.
However, a couple points to counteract a few of your ideas, and new ideas to potentially produce solutions
First off, I’m not sure why you think the amount of superheated water matters? It feels like you are looking at a prescribed amount of metal. If a race is smaller than humans, it will therefore not need as much metal for tools and the like, and so I don’t see it as an issue, as by the time they need mass amounts of metal to be able to make space ships and such there will assumably be mass coordinated efforts (or they could have looked into more efficient ways of smelting metals??). If the chunk is small enough, it could melt
As to shaping, I was kind of assuming they were already a Stone Age Civ, and could potentially use this kind of tool or some similar tool to shape the metal, at least some.
However, you raise/reinforce the point strongly about the amount of time the heat is generated for, and I agree. A solution to that could be a group of these sapients snapping and heating the metal in tandem, with one snapping, and then another snapping right after as the other begins to recharge (for example, if the blast lasts an eighth of a second and it takes one second to recharge a shot, then eight of the sophonts working in tandem) and so on while another shapes the actual metal using tools. The problem here is how they would have learned to do this in the first place.
Your points are exactly the countermeasures I thought of, it’s possible, just not practical.
Good thing we are trying to see if it is possible not probable. Even if it is a trillion to one odds, it would still mean that underwater (post-Stone Age) civilizations were possible.
Back to thinking about the idea itself, The biggest issue is still why they would make the sustained heat, and I’ve run a couple different scenarios through my head but none have worked out. I’ll continue mulling it around and see if I come up with anything
One made a bet, the other accepted.
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First: you all have been very civil I’m proud. Second: it’s not a heat, it’s a incredibly short explosion. I don’t see how that can smelt metal.