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And that's a good thing, because if they lived as long as we do and worked out how to get along with each other they'd be running the planet, and most likely fa
by TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
And that's a good thing, because if they lived as long as we do and worked out how to get along with each other they'd be running the planet, and most likely farming us for food.
They're really terrifyingly smart.
- riffraff 6y agothere is some pretty good sci-fi about intelligent octopuses[1], one of the coolest ideas is how a society might evolve in a way that reflects the animal's nervous system, i.e. more of a distributed thing than our centralized one. (Though one should put in the time to also read the novel of which this is a sequel, which is about intelligent spiders, and is also pretty nice.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Tchaikovsky#Children_of_Ruin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Tchaikovsky#Children_of...
- jgwil2 6y agoChildren of Time is awesome. I haven't read the sequel but the prospect of intelligent octopuses certainly whets the appetite.
- willis936 6y agoIt’s pretty hard to rule the land from the water. Even with all of our technological might, do you think we could wage war on an ocean-bound technologically advanced species? They have the same disadvantage. In all likelihood we would coexist.
- maxerickson 6y agoDo you get a technological society without air? Cooking and metallurgy are both pretty important, and we got them incrementally, starting from fire being pretty easy to do.
- willis936 6y agoI don’t have a good answer to “what does underwater technological progression look like?” I just want to point out that we are under a heavy survivorship bias. Just because we are where we are does not mean there aren’t other plausible histories.
- maxerickson 6y agoSure, you can't identify path dependence from 1 data point. Moving back to the land-sea war, we know how to make bombs and stuff, so they better have something like steel and know how to come attack us on land and so on if there is any notion of it being a contest.
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- Ralfp 6y agoThey would need to solve the problem that was easy on land: how do you release an energy from one resource to thermally pricess other resource (food at first but then metals).