6 ms·
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
by jdw64 5mo ago
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
- vitally3643 5mo agoThat'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.
- smilespray 5mo agoAnd a sample size of one.
- vitally3643 5mo agoThat's what I said, yes.
- nobodyandproud 5mo agoWe have counter examples of human pods that never really achieved “civilization”. What’s missing that make them more akin to orcas or wolves?
- greiskul 5mo agoIt is possible it is just time. Modern humans are considered to have existed for 300k~ years. Civilizations are about 6k years old. So who knows. Maybe if you gave them an extra 10k years, they would have achived "civilization". It is not much for the scale of human existance. But it is longer than any of our civilizations has existed for.
- nobodyandproud 5mo agoFor humans, I wonder if population size and density is also a factor. That is, if there’s a critical mass and population size.
- asdff 5mo agoAnd makes sense with agriculture and civilization coming together. Agriculture improved the carrying capacity of an acre of land dramatically from what it was from foraging and hunting.
- HarHarVeryFunny 5mo agoWritten language ? Got it too easy ?
- nobodyandproud 5mo agoIt doesn’t have to be writing. At least one culture used ropes and knots.
- HarHarVeryFunny 5mo agoI think that (Incas) was more numerical record keeping rather than written language. What's special about written language (which some existing hunter-gatherer tribes still don't have), as opposed to spoken language, is that it allows cultural knowledge to be spread, stored, accumulated, and built upon.
- aurareturn 5mo agoFire, agriculture, electricity, AI. Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoAI hasn’t taken its final form yet.
- aozame 5mo agoAI is not important at all. Just make things more convenient, but is completely unnecessary.
- bdamm 5mo agoCheck back in 5 years. This is going to age poorly. The reason is that, despite what many think, AI actually is able to create novel ideas and solutions. That's why AlphaGo was so important; it couldn't beat the world's best Go player just be being a fancy autocomplete and a big processor. It had to create new discoveries and then use them effectively. That was the turning point. It's been a decade of improvements since then, and AI is already making discoveries we couldn't have made without it. The impacts are already here and in your world, you just haven't recognized them as such yet. But in a few years it will be undeniable to even the most uneducated observer, since changes that could not be possible will be present in every person's life as the effects ripple out across basically every industry.
- artisin 5mo agoIn no timeline nor carbon-based universe does GP's comment age poorly.
- stasomatic 5mo agoI am a bit skeptical but cautiously optimistic about AI “creating novel ideas”, if we are using “create” pedantically. Any interesting examples?
- 5mo ago
- ekelsen 5mo agoInteresting 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"?).
- sarkhan 5mo agoOrcas 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.
- ekelsen 5mo agohaving arms is probably an advantage in developing tool-use, but who knows!
- fhdkweig 5mo agoThe 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.
- ekelsen 5mo agoI would argue that not having any overlap between generations is a bigger problem. It guarantees no accumulation of knowledge.
- fhdkweig 5mo agoAgreed. If they were social enough to form large communities of unrelated families, it would also fix the generation overlap. But they don't do that either. They seem to be in a weird evolutionary dead end for intelligence.
- Calavar 5mo agoBrains 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.
- onlypassingthru 5mo agoWhen did octopuses start breathing air?
- Calavar 5mo agoOctopuses are smart, but I've yet to see anything that suggests they are smarter than dolphins or whales.
- mapt 5mo agoBoth 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.
- onlypassingthru 5mo agoI'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-here-are-eight-examples-how.html https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/octopuses-keep-surprising-us-...
- SJC_Hacker 5mo agoFemale octopi also die reproducing. Knowledge cannot be passed from one generation to the next. Everything they know is either instinctual or learned.
- zahlman 5mo agoPhysically 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.
- card_zero 5mo agoBeing immersed in solvent can't help with things like graphic arts and pottery.
- nobodyandproud 5mo agoHumans 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.
- TheBigSalad 5mo agoYou'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.
- layer8 5mo agoOne 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.
- HarHarVeryFunny 5mo ago1) Land has more diverse and rapidly changing environments, creating generalists, creating advanced intelligence 2) Civilization requires hands, but in water fins and flippers are more useful 3) Sure, it could have worked out differently, but here we are
- stasomatic 5mo agoCan’t answer that, nobody will likely to be able to ever, outside religions. We are NBKs. How that happened, idk, some cosmic curse. Dolphins didn’t develop atlatals, broad heads, catapults, napalm, and F35s.
- yieldcrv 5mo ago> but why did civilization begin on land? Octopus have civilization, despite the usual solo trip, group behavior has been observed, small neighborhoods of octopi staying within their shells and occasionally pestering each other. Some aquatic mammals have civilization as well. A lot of what's going on just hasn't been observed well