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I've wondered if the first of the great filters isn't simply water. Assuming something like octopuses evolved into a relatively long lived tool-using species w
by knome 6y ago
I've wondered if the first of the great filters isn't simply water.
Assuming something like octopuses evolved into a relatively long lived tool-using species with complex communication, they would be infinitely hampered by their environment. Even if they were lucky, as we were, and their planet had available great reserves of fossil fuels, they could not burn them. They cannot invent fire. Without fire, they have no way to invent metallurgy. Or glassworks. Or plastics.
What are the odds of having enough water for life to spark without having so much of it that it blankets the surface? Anything evolving on worlds with little land seem unlikely to ever escape their world.
Life could be commonplace, but if most worlds it evolves on are 99% water, we would never see it or hear it. The universe would be silent.
It may be our luck in simply being terrestrial rather than aquatic that separates us from our apparently absent galactic cohabitants.
Being in a position to be capable of taking advantage of burnable trees, and later coals and oils may be beyond rare in the universe.
- lisper 6y agoYou don't need land to have fire. It's enough to have photosynthesis producing free oxygen. That produces an energy store at the water-air interface. That would lead to life forms evolving to take advantage of the benefit of living at that boundary and that would eventually lead to the formation of biological rather than geological land masses. Hm, sounds like a good premise for a SciFi novel. :-)
- isaacgreyed 6y agoI may be misunderstanding the free oxygen part, but if that's the case why doesn't that happen in our ocean?
- lisper 6y agoBecause it's easier to harvest free oxygen on land. So since we have land, free-oxygen harvesters live there. Then they turn around and eat anything close to the surface that could evolve into a land-equivalent. But on an all-water planet, the putative bio-land makers would not have to compete with actual land-dwelling creatures because there wouldn't be any. [UPDATE] Just to be clear: there's obviously no way to know whether this would happen. I'm only arguing that it could happen, and so lack of land is not necessarily a show-stopper for industrial civilization to emerge.
- bravoetch 6y agoHydrothermal vents can provide heat. It's not the great utility of being able to make heat on demand anywhere, but it does exist and provide another path for progress.