This idea, as has been said, this has been discussed before, many times. I is still kinda functional. I think this one has been milked dry and we should move on. Also it wouldn’t brake reality to have metal smelting underwater without lava, people on this thread are VERY creative, I’d read the whole thing and try to find more if I were you. (That is my strategy.)
i don’t read the old ones, I suspect in wats ups for ones (and sry), if need creativity, maybe I have 2 directions: Greek fire, also know as a underwater fire, still traing too understand how they made, and maybe use of “Alkali” materials like Sodium as a heat source, as they aggressive “explosive” with water.
sry again for not look on the past
It would be even worse, since the aquatic species can’t go on land. There’s literally nothing stopping the amphibians from going ‘nah I’ll just stay on land. What are you going to do? Leave the water?’
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The amphibians might not be able to stay on land permanently. For example, a heavily tilted planet may have summers too hot for the amphibians to survive on land
I love that, like Venice but everyone’s homes had a bacement leval that was submerged. Also if that was the case they probubly wouldn’t have a choice, as it is likely their forms would evolve to handle the seasons, with their legs merging into a flipper every summer or something.
Studying on this one, the technology for this seems more and more clear. To generate any true bubbles you need a fluid sustaining against the pressures of another fluid. (This is kind of what a cell is.) Depending on the chemistry of the two liquids the fluid can shift result in how well it can sustain the pressures. To protect this bubble further you may be able to seal it off in a cuticle/shell which the bubble can even develop in. It is obvious that being one of the first things you notice underwater, bubbles, will be one of the first things you experiment on if you have human like will and intelligence. Any biological creatures with a tough yet deformable membrane can help out (If not biological, a thin film of rock). Blowing a flammable liquid at a high enough pressure will bloat this membrane out. Afterwords you can inflate with oxygen which is overly easy. Take some photosynthetic microbes and seal them off in the membrane waiting for it to bloat out overtime with oxygen. If you can store up on these packets you can make a metal forgery by two large shells that can snap into each other, let it be out of rocks you’ve chiseled yourself, or biological. Now you blow the water out with the fluid from the packets pushing against it, add in the metals, seal it off, and ignite it. Now we moved from step one to step two. Water is an easy coolant so depending on the flow the liquid metals seep out can depend on final shape. This will get you started on metal tools which will then get you to higher advancements in the technology. Also I’ve only conjured up this idea as a final clear cut one, but the steps I’ve gave give room for a whole lot more.
It seems like this set-up could not accept much extra air from a tuyere, and so may not be able to get hot enough to smelt ore
Dispite the fact that this would work, no one wod make it. You are right that a human-like intelligence in the water would be interested in bubbles, but, this is a task that is both resource, and time consuming, as well as the fact that it brings no immediate benefit, this task would not be used unless a society had a lot of specialization. In all of human history, I cannot think if a single civilization with both high enough specialization to have jobs that didn’t provide obvious survival advantages and lack metal tools. At this rate you need metal to make metal, so you had better hope you have a time machine.
Ok, well lets start off with what you’ve said about human-like intelligence. We are only but human, and we are not only this but humans engineering a game about things that are not human that we’ve never encountered and only have known to imagine. Now this human brain of ours is all we have for reference, and we at least know with this human mind of ours that our thinking is a sliver of the possible types of intelligence in the universe we could hope to fathom. And I and you as a human being can take sources out there and point right in the direction of what this human mind is. A lack of resource didn’t stop humanity from building the world into what it is, starting from an islands with no tools with single individuals, to landing on the moon. And if benefits are the problem, how the humanity conjure up technologies and concepts if it was not for the logic of finding the benefit itself before them? Why should’ve Newton expanded into calculus when he could’ve taken a break from his own study for example. Why go send probes to the moon onto other planets if the cost to send them is so dire. And if you argue it is for pride then why not apply pride to our personified aliens here? What I think personally is that anything will be done if it can be done and the individual is currently sufficient and developed enough to do so. However, if larger formations of organisation come into play, then conformity increases and taking prolonging risks dwindle. Honestly who are we to say aquatic creatures with human-like in intelligence can’t prolong the discovery of such a thing? The mind set of the human extends beyond the larger conformity until it traps itself in it. Who’s even to say that even these aliens need to focus on the psychology of man, especially on the psychology of all psychologies humans can grasp for that matter? These aliens may be vastly different and go at every approach of a risk until it’s proven over, and after that, go on a bit more. But our biases to out humancentric bipedal hairless terrestrial monkey brains make sense. Besides, we’re only human.
An epipelagic creature might be able to build rafts and other boats, which could be used to house smelters and other fiery things. They could discover this fire, by experimenting with dried stones and plants
So, umm, sorry about this but I gotta criticize this. You didn’t seem to get the specialization arugument: why could humans make 0s and calculus? I mean, they were just concepts that barely did a thing for our immediate survival. I mean, what about rockets and Turing era computers? Simple, we had stability. Einstein and Fermi could work on things that were important as they didn’t have to make food. Recall when we made siege engines, even just wooden ones? Well into the bronze age. Why? As Arcamidies didn’t have to spend his time on food finding, and why is that? Metal. Before the discovery of metal everyone needed to gather, of farm, or make obvious advancements, and if metal is this hard to make its a not obvious enough. Also I found out that fish swim bladders are sometimes full of oxygen, so if you popped one in a bubble you’d get some oxygen in there.
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Wait, do you claim that underwater cities can not keep with technological specialization because the needed technologies aren’t obvious enough? If you want to submit specialization so a species has nothing better to do, they’ll just need supply of essential things to live which is achieved by farming items. If you want specialization I imagine you give everyone easy access to essentials so they won’t have to work hard for it themselves, and then you’d just need some sort of idea passing system (or school) so people gain knowledge through others. This causes interest in some of the most random things and eventually some individual will gain interest on it. Governments and human-like political forms usually don’t pick up on short term benefits except to boast, but anyone else could. After the individual gains certain material and sufficient amount of labour their project will be done. Just to be clear, the steam engine and metal forgery didn’t start specialization, they’ve only amplified it by spreading ideas. The real starter was agriculture which allowed people to do other things than look for food (they can settle down and think). Also, you hinge more into the industrialization of farming. The industrialization factor does not deal with steam engines at all, that was just am amplifier for production. You also seem to not account the fact that industrial production refers more on the term of trading items, goods, and services and not what fancy tech you can use to do so. There are still technologies and concepts that have specialized outside of such a range of metals.
Yeah, I agree, it’s just that the examples you used (landing on the moon, laws of physics, space probes and whatnot) require that leval of automation, metal making in this example doesn’t so yeah, I agree. But now we need to discuss the creation of underwater spicalization so I’ll make a thread for that. Edit, made it!: The thread, ta-da
I understand what you mean now. Though in my case I meant more on the tenacity and toil towards a risky goal, it’s still a bad example because the production needed is high level. I think this type of experimentation is still highly possible after the creatures are able to settle down and feel more curiosity.
Well, the three (this is take three arter all) prevailing solutions to the underwater civilization problem are:
1 amphibians, they could forge above water or enslave a terrestrial species but mostly live under water.
2 rafts, a aquatic species may stumble across fire and make rafts to store it.
3 bubbles, they can be sealed in a storage container and filled with the air from photosynthesis or swim bladders, both of which are oxygen.
How could a bubble-system work with tuyeres? Tuyeres seem pretty important to smelting, and I’m unsure of how a container can accept air from a tuyere and output depleted air without water getting in
EDIT: I’ve read that some metals can be smelted at low enough temperatures to be smelted without tuyeres if the fuel is hot enough, but I think tuyeres would still be needed to make high-quality metal
There is the concept of splitting shells of bubbles off and flowing different things into different spots. Something like those interesting iconic chemistry/alchemy set ups.
The air still needs to leave at some point
And so it will, as waste bubbles. Basically like those CO2 clouds from factories but as boiling bubbles underwater. Heck, maybe the pressures might be enough to ignore an air-water filter? May or may not do math for that later.
The filter would either have to withstand the heat of the furnace, or the system would likely have to be so long as the require a ludicrous amount of power to operate