Jared Towers was in his research vessel on two separate occasions watching killer whales off the coast of Vancouver Island when the orcas dropped their prey directly in front of
If whales had thumbs (to enable tool building), I have no doubt they’d have become dominant like humans did on land. Though I suppose it would’ve been difficult to discover fire underwater.
You know I’ve had thoughts about exactly this problem; what if a species evolved extreme intelligence but had no access to dry land to develop technologies.
Incoming speculation:
Tap for spoiler
I envisioned it would be something like octopus, because they absolutely fit the bill with tentacles workable as manipulation appendages, and would absolutely have developed technologies if they lived more than a couple years, and raised their young to pass on information.
I suspect they would be capable of observing stuff around them and understanding how it works at least as well as early agrarian societies, since they have proven able to figure out things like opening jar lids (even from the inside!) and escaping their tanks and stuff. So we’d see them creating nets to ranch fish, and I suspect their technology, continuing down that path, would probably be temperature and bioengineering-based, since electricity would be an epic challenge.
But you can create biological solutions to like… most stuff, if that’s all you’ve got to work with (in fact there’s a whole field called biomimicry that focuses on finding solutions to modern problems in already-existing forms through nature, and the solutions are almost always simple and effective) Selective breeding wouldn’t be fast or anything but it would do. At least until they sort out other stuff. Ocean life already has a huge huge range of features, it would only be a matter of choosing the right starting creature.
As for heat tech, there are natural heat sources like vents, but there are also sources like radiation/radioactive materials. The water does a good job shielding the radioactivity, so they could probably use the heat generated from either source to do basic mechanical work using something like steam engines. Could also be used to transform materials (cooking food, melting soft metals, etc.)
Even Homo sapiens, the overwhelmingly dominant species on this planet, having all the things ready, didn’t do a lot of progress for tens of thousands of years.
A technological civilization looks like a chain reaction that can’t quite start without a initial spark. I think anthropologists are still trying to find out what that spark was.
Yeah, like I said they’d need to live more than a couple years and have some way to pass on learned information, but the body plan and intelligence adaptability still meet the mark to be the base of the thought experiment. Mostly because I am not creative enough to come up with another ideal.
Yeah it kind of freaks me out a mollusk got that smart. Their development of intelligence is so independent from most other species on earth, it’s just bizarre. It gives human but in another animal phylum.
I mean if we met them as a species on another planet and they had a million years more than we did to develop (relatively speaking), without the inherent space travel question, and maybe with less inherent ability to fuck up the biome?
They probably would have magic, to us. A supernatural control over their engineered beings, and everything that serves as technology is alive?
If whales had thumbs (to enable tool building), I have no doubt they’d have become dominant like humans did on land. Though I suppose it would’ve been difficult to discover fire underwater.
You know I’ve had thoughts about exactly this problem; what if a species evolved extreme intelligence but had no access to dry land to develop technologies.
Incoming speculation:
Tap for spoiler
I envisioned it would be something like octopus, because they absolutely fit the bill with tentacles workable as manipulation appendages, and would absolutely have developed technologies if they lived more than a couple years, and raised their young to pass on information.
I suspect they would be capable of observing stuff around them and understanding how it works at least as well as early agrarian societies, since they have proven able to figure out things like opening jar lids (even from the inside!) and escaping their tanks and stuff. So we’d see them creating nets to ranch fish, and I suspect their technology, continuing down that path, would probably be temperature and bioengineering-based, since electricity would be an epic challenge.
But you can create biological solutions to like… most stuff, if that’s all you’ve got to work with (in fact there’s a whole field called biomimicry that focuses on finding solutions to modern problems in already-existing forms through nature, and the solutions are almost always simple and effective) Selective breeding wouldn’t be fast or anything but it would do. At least until they sort out other stuff. Ocean life already has a huge huge range of features, it would only be a matter of choosing the right starting creature.
As for heat tech, there are natural heat sources like vents, but there are also sources like radiation/radioactive materials. The water does a good job shielding the radioactivity, so they could probably use the heat generated from either source to do basic mechanical work using something like steam engines. Could also be used to transform materials (cooking food, melting soft metals, etc.)
Octopuses are quite intelligent but I don’t think they have the lifespan to become a dominant society.
So many creatures are almost there but missing just one or two things.
Even Homo sapiens, the overwhelmingly dominant species on this planet, having all the things ready, didn’t do a lot of progress for tens of thousands of years.
A technological civilization looks like a chain reaction that can’t quite start without a initial spark. I think anthropologists are still trying to find out what that spark was.
Yeah, like I said they’d need to live more than a couple years and have some way to pass on learned information, but the body plan and intelligence adaptability still meet the mark to be the base of the thought experiment. Mostly because I am not creative enough to come up with another ideal.
Yeah it kind of freaks me out a mollusk got that smart. Their development of intelligence is so independent from most other species on earth, it’s just bizarre. It gives human but in another animal phylum.
They develop magic instead.
That would be quite the discovery
I mean if we met them as a species on another planet and they had a million years more than we did to develop (relatively speaking), without the inherent space travel question, and maybe with less inherent ability to fuck up the biome?
They probably would have magic, to us. A supernatural control over their engineered beings, and everything that serves as technology is alive?
Yeah that’s already magic. 😊
No like, their world is infested with mana or they discover psionic abilities.
Only us humans are worthy enough to create advanced enough technology that looks like magic
I’m super into that too :)
Cooking over/near a thermal vent FTW