Can aquatic species really become spacefaring ???

[[JdG] Pejman]

I would guess one of the most important steps in the technological progress to become a civilization that could eventually leave a planet would be the mastery of fire which seems unlikely if you live underwater. Use of electricity seems also more complicated for underwater civilization.

[The Guy with Lag]

İ Think all of you are missing an important point. hands. You need free hands to create, hold tools so that whole thing starts going.
You can make fish, or dolphins 10 times more intelligent than humans but you wouldnt see a technological civilization.

[sammwich]

JdG Pejman님이 먼저 게시:

I see people talking about lava for fire

I was talking about fire for METALLURGY, lava isn't hot enough for that.

If you want to make a spaceship (that are supposed to handle entry in atmosphere and exit from atmosphere) you'll probably need some kind of metallurgy unless they use organic materials to make their spaceships (such materials being completely unknown to us I guess, maybe some types of ceramics).


And I saw some people that completely missed the point : it's not about possibility of life, if about reaching a technological level that allows to leave the solar system

heck water adds so many constraints (stuff like combustion engine, handling liquids because they'll just mix with water around it and many stuff you think are simple)

As people said chemistry would be also much harder.

The whole subject is about reaching a technological level that allows planetary colonization, we don't care about wise whales and stuff like that ....

Furthermore, literally everyone is forgetting that one of the most useful things about fire is that it is portable and can be made literally anywhere. If an underwater civilization somehow overcomes the technical limitations of trying to smelt using lava while submerged, they are still dependent on lava vents. That means 99% of their potential living space can't produce metal tools and can't cook food.

You get more calories from cooked food. Even if you could build a metal using civilization from scratch underwater, it's going to be like having both legs and your right arm permanently tied behind your back. It took us at least 100,000 years from basic stone tools to metal tools and agriculture. If 99% of us had no access to fire, that means that, like gorillas for example, they would have to spend as much of their time obtaining and eating food, just like unintelligent wild animals. Maybe they're cold blooded and live in a very warm ocean? Well, that's just another constraint slowing their growth, isn't it?

The odds are highly against it, even if possible. Where is the evolutionary pressure? Humans got a big advantage from using fire, then another big advantage from stone spears, then another from so on. If underwater cooking and smelting are difficult (and probably dangerous with lava fumes!), does it make sense to put the work into it? Some genius octopus figures it, but can he convince his fellows to adopt it if it is a highly marginal advantage?

[[JdG] Pejman]

The Guy with Lag님이 먼저 게시:

İ Think all of you are missing an important point. hands. You need free hands to create, hold tools so that whole thing starts going.
You can make fish, or dolphins 10 times more intelligent than humans but you wouldn't see a technological civilization.

oh no, the hands can be evolved, heck octopus has tentacles and can manipulate stuff. The whole question was if you had a stone age civilization underwater (so they can already use basic tools made of bones/rock/coral/whatever is easily available) could it get to a point where it has the tech to leave the planet


also as sammwich said the availability of using lava vents is horrible. First you would need the "spark" to discover it (for instance fire happened anywhere lightning struck so you could encounter it anyway for the first time, then learn the uses and stuff)



TBH the only way I see a full aquatic species (one that live it's whole life underwater) become spacefaring is something like Mass effect's leviathan where they mindcontroled other species that lived on the surface xD.

This or use a very weird full organic based technology (like zergs in starcraft)

[The Guy with Lag]

You are missing the point. Hands can be evolved? that makes no sense.. How you are going to master genetic engineering and modify your own species to have hands if you dont have.. i mean huts?
You are missing the point you need precise tools to begin with. You need something that would invent a wheel, or in this case, a fin?. No its not the same with holding basically. Holding up rocks and shells like octopus'es has no where near the avaliable utility that is required to make mechanical or engineering work.

[Orion Invictus]

The Guy with Lag님이 먼저 게시:

You are missing the point. Hands can be evolved? that makes no sense.. How you are going to master genetic engineering and modify your own species to have hands if you dont have.. i mean huts?
You are missing the point you need precise tools to begin with. You need something that would invent a wheel, or in this case, a fin?. No its not the same with holding basically. Holding up rocks and shells like octopus'es has no where near the avaliable utility that is required to make mechanical or engineering work.

Evolution doesn't need genetic engineering, it just happens naturally over the course of several million years.

[The Guy with Lag]

Evolution doesnt neccessarely evolve hands...
İ think you guys approach this as if evolution has an end goal, it doesnt.

[ghpstage]

Indeed it doesn't, but we do know that it can produce hands, and there is no reason to believe that alternatives would not be possible. The existence of known mechanisms to allow for tool use makes it reasonable to wave that particular issue away.
After all, this topic isn't asking whether it has or will happen, merely whether it plausibly could.

It is very different to the issues faced in metallurgy, engineering, chemistry, physics and various other fields in which our traditions and knowledge would be presented with very solid walls that extend right up to the waters surface.

[NuclearSnail]

JdG Pejman님이 먼저 게시:

I would guess one of the most important steps in the technological progress to become a civilization that could eventually leave a planet would be the mastery of fire which seems unlikely if you live underwater. Use of electricity seems also more complicated for underwater civilization.

It's hard enough for a land living species to get into space. An aquatic species first of all, has no fire. Controlling fire is the basis of all technology. Second, wooo all that mass. It's hard enough to launch an aluminum and air filled cabin the size of a closest into orbit. Imagine having to move the mass of all that water, and the super more robust structure required to support the mass of that water under high inertial stress. It's unlikely enough that I'd call it simple fantasy.

More on fire:
It's unlikely that you could even have a technological species develop on dry land under conditions like earth's own carboniferous period. The reason being that the oxygen mix allows for easy fire starting, but NOT easy control of said fire. It just so happens that when humans evolved on earth, the atmosphere happens to have just the perfect mix of gasses to make fire very easy to control, and the life here was just right to provide easy to squire fuel for that fire. Intelligence may be common in the universe, but even stone age technology may be astronomically rare. So much so, that we may be all there is.

[Orion Invictus]

The Guy with Lag님이 먼저 게시:

Evolution doesnt neccessarely evolve hands...
İ think you guys approach this as if evolution has an end goal, it doesnt.

Evolution doesn't necessarily not evolve hands (or equivalent or better) either.

[The Guy with Lag]

Can yes, would it ? No.
%99.9999 of all living beings did so without free hands. Not front legs, free hands.
The evolutionary push for such a thing is very nich. Our assumptions on the processes are by far off.
intelligence is a rather useless trait unless a nich enviroment. Free hands and standing upright in a way that allows limbs to be used for crafting, is another nightmarishly unlikely scenario.
You ha ve to understand, if you are fast enough to catch, strong enough to kill, able to eat what you catch and live just enough to reproduce, evolution calls it a day. Youı don't even have to live long enough for a long a periodic process of education or learning. Living just a couple of weeks is enough if most circumstances. So we have more problems.

Intelligence unlikely to be advantageous unless you are allready a social co operative creature.
Free hands, even more unlikely because if you have claws or teeth to kill and fast enough to catch, evolution could easily disregard it.
Standing upright or limbs that are free for other things, if you are using your hands for movement or agility, free hands are not so free. Hands of an orangutan are used for movement, same with most apes and monkeys.
The need for tools, we have to remember, most living beings even being able to use tools, don't need them for most circumstances. Crows can break beans and nuts by hitting it on the ground, monkeys do the same with stones. Tool usage but basic.
That is the important part, just so we can doesn't mean we need them or should. If humans for example had thich furr or layers of fat to keep us warm, you can argue that invention of clothing or huts would never have happened. It would be inefficient use.

Ofc this is just biological aspect of it. Even if you could, why would you bother inventing? There is a socio-culturel aspect to it as well. There also needs to be sometthing, or a rivalry for creating that push. There is no guarantee technological push would ever be a civilizations goal or even by product of other goals. We have numerous examples of tribes simply not inventing but also abondoning the use of technology because they are not needed, not good, or simply they wouldn't bother with it because there is no social or individual push for intelligent designs or inventions. Tazmanians for example, after migrating to the island and isolating from their australian ancestors, simply ditched all use of boat making, sturdier spear, stone crafting, ropes, nets, fishing etc. even bows, to the qualtiy of australians.
When antropologists asked the australian natives about their tazmanian cousins, they were shocked to hear that they didn't have the things they did. They simply didn't, in time forgot. You can say they "devolved" back into stone ages.

[Nonotorious]

This thread is funny, i think a lot of you have some good ideas but are missing some key ingredients. Yes fire is important for a species in an atmosphere like our own, in another atmosphere it could be that something else is used for combustion instead of oxygen.
There are chemical reactions that fish and other things do to generate electricity or heat underwater, but i think the real problem with an underwater species is the pressure difference, going from intense pressure to a vacuum is pretty tough, just look at what happens to deep sea fish. As for launching something that is partially submerged is actually easier because the buoyancy helps catapult the rocket.
Also would a fish person that evolved underwater with no land even know of space? Would their eyes even be evolved enough to see the light from the stars if they peaked their head out of the water? If they even have eyes. There could be civilizations out there living around underwater vents that will never know anything else because they are living under an ice sheet and to them, that is the entire universe.

[RawCode]

"fish person" will never develop sapience, just like plants, mushrooms, "rocks" and almost every other sci-fi type of alien.

due to how exactly evolution works, all sapient life in galaxy will be exactly like us, only "cosmetic" differences are possible, everything else will be exactly the same.

and buoyancy DO NOT HELP catapult the rocket into space, due to obvious reasons - rocket will be more dense then water.

[Orion Invictus]

RawCode님이 먼저 게시:

"fish person" will never develop sapience, just like plants, mushrooms, "rocks" and almost every other sci-fi type of alien.

due to how exactly evolution works, all sapient life in galaxy will be exactly like us, only "cosmetic" differences are possible, everything else will be exactly the same.

That's not how evolution works, at all.

RawCode님이 먼저 게시:

and buoyancy DO NOT HELP catapult the rocket into space, due to obvious reasons - rocket will be more dense then water.

Buoyancy - a force applied to an object that's immersed in a fluid - is a function of volume, not density. You're thinking of flotation, which occurs when something is less dense than water (or whatever fluid it's immersed in).

[The Guy with Lag]

i think we need to put cosmology here and say, yes there are other oxidizing elements, but due to abundence and avaliablity, it would be oxygen. So..
Also no matter whatever the element is, is it even possible for fire underwater?
underwater, not surface.

[frowningmirror]

The Guy with Lag님이 먼저 게시:

i think we need to put cosmology here and say, yes there are other oxidizing elements, but due to abundence and avaliablity, it would be oxygen. So..
Also no matter whatever the element is, is it even possible for fire underwater?
underwater, not surface.

Yes, magnesium and things that burn their bonded oxygen through chemical release. I'd say this is incredibly inefficient though, water is still cold and the fuel, oxygen ect can get smothered under pressure easily.