So the theory explained here is that Hydrogen mixed with the Oxygen in the melted rock (magma) of earth, under extremely high pressure to create our earth specific flavor of H2O (appropriate amount of trace minerals and deuterium).
I have little artistic ability myself, but I am continuously in awe of what artists create. It makes me hope for the optimistic outlook of AI where UBI frees people to pursue creative and intellectual pursuits, rather than constantly trying to push a stock price uphill.
Life began in the Ocean, but why did civilization begin on land? Is it because of fire? But I wonder if a different kind of civilization could have emerged
That's one theory, yes. Cooking food (with fire) makes more calories available, meaning less hunting required to support more individuals, and/or freeing up more time and calories for thinking. This allowed us to evolve bigger and more complex brains.
While it's not a given that fire is a hard prerequisite for an industrial civilization, it certainly accelerated our technological development. Fact of the matter is, we know of exactly one civilization, which is not enough to draw any conclusions. There's no real reason we know of that aquatic species cannot evolve into a technological civilization, we just haven't seen it happen. Fact is we don't really know how an intelligent technological species evolves. We only have guesses from our own history.
That's the fun thing, since we have only observed a single advanced civilization, and that one only indirectly through archaeological evidence, there's no hard facts to be had! We can only make guesses. We don't know what is and is not required to make an advanced technological species, and we won't have any answers until we meet another one to compare with.
Arguably they're all fire -- requiring/involving forms of combustion.
(Well, debatable about agriculture, slash'n'burn wasn't the only form of it, but it was common for land clearing at least... all we have now is one that involves combustion engines, though...)
Nuclear weapons and the control structure around their use and fossil fuels and the C-corporation and what it optimizes for will probably turn out to be more important to the long-term future of humanity and it's civilization.
Fossil fuels are another feature like fire. One of the leading theories is that the availability of extremely energy dense fuels is one of the primary reason we were able to industrialize, and that without those fuels industrialization would be vastly more difficult if not impossible.
Personally I disagree with 'impossible', but it would definitely be harder. There's a pretty good argument to be made for leaving significant quantities of fossil fuels in the ground for the next civilization. If we wipe ourselves out, whoever comes next is going to very badly need those fuels to rebuild an industrial base.
There were bronze age industrial sites. Esp Tin-bronze smelting sites. Complete with child labour, open pit mines, assembly line style processing, and heavy metal poisoning. E.g. Semiyarka, in present day Kazakhstan, ~1600 BCE. You can still see the environmental damage to this day from the air.
Romans had industrial processes, too, for things like fabric / laundry cleaning.
What's new in the 18th/19th century is full-on mechanization. And the wage labour system accompanies by acts of enclosure etc to drive the peasantry off the land and into factories. Also the mechanization of agriculture.
Brains are resource hungry, especially oxygen hungry. Earth's air is orders of magnitude richer in oxygen molecules than its water. This likely made it easier for intelligence to develop on land. It's worth noting that the smartest aquatic animals are air breathing mammals that spent much of their evolutionary history on land before returning to water.
I've heard that the biggest limiting factor in octopus ocean domination is their short lifespans. Tool use, building structures, communication, facial recognition, multiple brains, it's all there.
Both whales and prairie dogs turn out to have rather advanced degrees of verbal language capability, more complex than any of the Great Apes bar homo sapiens. Crows somehow culturally remember the face of an antagonist multiple generations later. Almost every highly social vertebrate has degrees of intelligence that would get you burned as a witch if you'd suggested it not too long ago, in the era when "Fishes clearly don't feel pain" was just a cultural default assumption.
Interesting to think what could be if cephalopods raised their young instead of leaving them to completely fend for themselves. It would start intergenerational knowledge transfer, i.e. culture. Maybe selection pressure then trends towards group cooperation instead of going it solo.
I still think there would be huge barriers to "civilization" as I think you mean? (Do any of the apes have "civilization"?).
The real problem with cephalopods is their lifespan. For their age, they are almost as smart as humans, the problem is that they don't live past the age of 5 years.
Physically manipulating objects is a lot harder underwater, even if you somehow evolve fine motor control despite not having any real use for it. So that severely limits what an intelligent aquatic species could actually do with that intelligence. Aside from fire you're missing the wheel, a writing system and many other things.
One hypothesis is that the brain began too look (and eventually plan) farther ahead with land animals, because you have a much farther view in air than in water. On land there is more evolutionary pressure to change one’s behavior regarding animals farther away that you see and that can see you, to predict their behavior and plan one’s own behavior within a larger time horizon.
You're talking about a thing that happened for 1 species for such a small period of Earth's history to be just a blip. There's not enough data to draw a conclusion here.
Humans are one of a handful species equipped to change their immediate environment to suit their needs, across virtually every environment, and introduce stability.
Beyond that…
Being able to have down time seems like a prerequisite to creating. civilization.
Also, having both the intelligence and desire to seem and recognize ways to improve—even if not strictly necessary—via tools to free up even more time also seems to be a requirement.
And having a system to reliably and in-scale transmit this knowledge is the final ingredient.
So some baseline stability, down-time,
intelligence, reliable knowledge transmission, tool-use for the above, and active willingness to improve all of the above all seem like necessary ingredients.
36 comments:
My Impacts project depicts a scene from the prolonged bombardment, a time when Earth was cratered by asteroids and comets:
* https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf#page=9
* https://impacts.to/bibliography.pdf
So the theory explained here is that Hydrogen mixed with the Oxygen in the melted rock (magma) of earth, under extremely high pressure to create our earth specific flavor of H2O (appropriate amount of trace minerals and deuterium).
Am I reading that correctly?
Link to the paper mentioned in the article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09630-7
Wow what an awesome art piece by Ada Zejun Shen that they commissioned(?) for this article!
Their portfolio is beautiful https://adazshen.com/
Wow, what a portfolio! This one in particular caught my eye: https://adazshen.com/Viral-Placenta
I have little artistic ability myself, but I am continuously in awe of what artists create. It makes me hope for the optimistic outlook of AI where UBI frees people to pursue creative and intellectual pursuits, rather than constantly trying to push a stock price uphill.
I thought it was ai generated lol
even when websites provide attribution for images, people don't read them
Life began in the Ocean, but why did civilization begin on land? Is it because of fire? But I wonder if a different kind of civilization could have emerged
That's one theory, yes. Cooking food (with fire) makes more calories available, meaning less hunting required to support more individuals, and/or freeing up more time and calories for thinking. This allowed us to evolve bigger and more complex brains.
While it's not a given that fire is a hard prerequisite for an industrial civilization, it certainly accelerated our technological development. Fact of the matter is, we know of exactly one civilization, which is not enough to draw any conclusions. There's no real reason we know of that aquatic species cannot evolve into a technological civilization, we just haven't seen it happen. Fact is we don't really know how an intelligent technological species evolves. We only have guesses from our own history.
Fire, agriculture, electricity, AI.
Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.
That's the fun thing, since we have only observed a single advanced civilization, and that one only indirectly through archaeological evidence, there's no hard facts to be had! We can only make guesses. We don't know what is and is not required to make an advanced technological species, and we won't have any answers until we meet another one to compare with.
Arguably they're all fire -- requiring/involving forms of combustion.
(Well, debatable about agriculture, slash'n'burn wasn't the only form of it, but it was common for land clearing at least... all we have now is one that involves combustion engines, though...)
AI is not important at all. Just make things more convenient, but is completely unnecessary.
It looks like you've already done so with the order of the sequence that you used.
Nuclear weapons and the control structure around their use and fossil fuels and the C-corporation and what it optimizes for will probably turn out to be more important to the long-term future of humanity and it's civilization.
Fossil fuels are another feature like fire. One of the leading theories is that the availability of extremely energy dense fuels is one of the primary reason we were able to industrialize, and that without those fuels industrialization would be vastly more difficult if not impossible.
Personally I disagree with 'impossible', but it would definitely be harder. There's a pretty good argument to be made for leaving significant quantities of fossil fuels in the ground for the next civilization. If we wipe ourselves out, whoever comes next is going to very badly need those fuels to rebuild an industrial base.
There were bronze age industrial sites. Esp Tin-bronze smelting sites. Complete with child labour, open pit mines, assembly line style processing, and heavy metal poisoning. E.g. Semiyarka, in present day Kazakhstan, ~1600 BCE. You can still see the environmental damage to this day from the air.
Romans had industrial processes, too, for things like fabric / laundry cleaning.
What's new in the 18th/19th century is full-on mechanization. And the wage labour system accompanies by acts of enclosure etc to drive the peasantry off the land and into factories. Also the mechanization of agriculture.
And a sample size of one.
That's what I said, yes.
We have counter examples of human pods that never really achieved “civilization”.
What’s missing that make them more akin to orcas or wolves?
Brains are resource hungry, especially oxygen hungry. Earth's air is orders of magnitude richer in oxygen molecules than its water. This likely made it easier for intelligence to develop on land. It's worth noting that the smartest aquatic animals are air breathing mammals that spent much of their evolutionary history on land before returning to water.
When did octopuses start breathing air?
Octopuses are smart, but I've yet to see anything that suggests they are smarter than dolphins or whales.
I've heard that the biggest limiting factor in octopus ocean domination is their short lifespans. Tool use, building structures, communication, facial recognition, multiple brains, it's all there.
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/octopuses-keep-surprising-us-...
Both whales and prairie dogs turn out to have rather advanced degrees of verbal language capability, more complex than any of the Great Apes bar homo sapiens. Crows somehow culturally remember the face of an antagonist multiple generations later. Almost every highly social vertebrate has degrees of intelligence that would get you burned as a witch if you'd suggested it not too long ago, in the era when "Fishes clearly don't feel pain" was just a cultural default assumption.
Interesting to think what could be if cephalopods raised their young instead of leaving them to completely fend for themselves. It would start intergenerational knowledge transfer, i.e. culture. Maybe selection pressure then trends towards group cooperation instead of going it solo.
I still think there would be huge barriers to "civilization" as I think you mean? (Do any of the apes have "civilization"?).
The real problem with cephalopods is their lifespan. For their age, they are almost as smart as humans, the problem is that they don't live past the age of 5 years.
Orcas do this already.
I mean there might be a already a civilization that is in the building that will peak 100k years later, and we just don't know about it.
having arms is probably an advantage in developing tool-use, but who knows!
Physically manipulating objects is a lot harder underwater, even if you somehow evolve fine motor control despite not having any real use for it. So that severely limits what an intelligent aquatic species could actually do with that intelligence. Aside from fire you're missing the wheel, a writing system and many other things.
Being immersed in solvent can't help with things like graphic arts and pottery.
One hypothesis is that the brain began too look (and eventually plan) farther ahead with land animals, because you have a much farther view in air than in water. On land there is more evolutionary pressure to change one’s behavior regarding animals farther away that you see and that can see you, to predict their behavior and plan one’s own behavior within a larger time horizon.
You're talking about a thing that happened for 1 species for such a small period of Earth's history to be just a blip. There's not enough data to draw a conclusion here.
Humans are one of a handful species equipped to change their immediate environment to suit their needs, across virtually every environment, and introduce stability.
Beyond that…
Being able to have down time seems like a prerequisite to creating. civilization.
Also, having both the intelligence and desire to seem and recognize ways to improve—even if not strictly necessary—via tools to free up even more time also seems to be a requirement.
And having a system to reliably and in-scale transmit this knowledge is the final ingredient.
So some baseline stability, down-time, intelligence, reliable knowledge transmission, tool-use for the above, and active willingness to improve all of the above all seem like necessary ingredients.
Maybe some of Earth's oceans came from its rings collapsing (not kidding)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPhwhq-f1Uo
200 years from now on HN.
"Where Did Earth Get Its Deserts? Maybe It's Ai, Datacentres and Climate Change"