Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems likely that the vast majority of life in the universe is aquatic, taking into account that the vast majority of habitable planets are ocean planets. And intelligent aquatic aliens are unlikely to have discovered metallurgy, since you need fire for that, so no industrial revolution.
What does this mean for the politics of aquatic aliens? are they reactionary?!?!?!?
>>829717>unlikely to have discovered metallurgy, since you need fire for thatThey have volcanoes and shit down there.
>And intelligent aquatic aliens are unlikely to have discovered metallurgy, since you need fire for that
Octopi use tools and thermite allows you do do metallurgy under water.
earth is also an ocean planet but our only intelligent species is terrestrial. any planet with life in it would probably be extremely diverse.
>>829720>>829718hate to be a meat proxy NPC, but AI said it don't work like that!!! Supposedly you need oxygen too because water dissipates heat too well and shit. i don't know shit abt chemistry, so I don't know who to trust on this
OP it probably means that aquatic life cant develop complex organization
i mean just eating cooked food alone is a huge reason we developed society. Fire being available everywhere and not only in non renewable volcanoes limits the possibilities of development
>>829760I think it's arrogant and a little crazy to jump to this conclusion with a sample of just one species developing civilization, while we're not even totally certain on why and how we got there. I think we need to get some gigantic telescopes in orbit and try to detect interstellar civilizations before we jump to conclusions.
>>829767The principles of our evolution are not planet specific. Marxism is all about being a universal study of societal evolution, not only to us humans.
Unless "aquatic" meant something fundemrntally different on a seperate planet, those same limiting factors would apply
>>829760Fire isn't the only way to cook food.
There are geothermal vents that could be used to cook.
Regardless, the only reason humans needed to learn how to cook food is because it saved a lot of digestion time. Many animals adapt and evolve around this restriction. It doesn't stand to reason that if you feed, say, a bird cooked meat, it's brain would increase in size.
Humans merely evolved around tool use to overcome natural pitfalls.
>>829775aquatic life near geothermal vents is bajillions of years older than humans developing firekeeping, yet no animal apart from us cooks food.
Despite how longstanding a geothermal vent could be, its simply not conducive to evolving civilization, as civlizations begin with that nomadic phase. It was our nomadic cooking that pushed us to eveolve social organization
It is our external tool and fire use that creates complex social organziation, as being able to digest or hunt with our base biology doesnt encourage social organizing.
>>829777>aquatic life near geothermal vents is bajillions of years older than humans developing firekeeping, yet no animal apart from us cooks food. Fair.
>It was our nomadic cooking that pushed us to eveolve social organizationMany animals hunt socially.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00265-026-03770-0Many animals groom each other.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982225004506Some animals even speak Chinese
https://ls.berkeley.edu/news/uc-berkeley-and-project-ceti-study-shows-sperm-whales-communicate-ways-similar-humans
>It is our external tool and fire use that creates complex social organziation, as being able to digest or hunt with our base biology doesnt encourage social organizing.I think we see similar patterns in enough differeny species to conclude that it was something other than just being social animals and using tools that makes a human a human. It could be the right material circumstances and a bit of luck, perhaps the opposable thumb making wider arrays of tool use capable.
>>829778but we arent talking about any social organization whatsoever, obviously animals can organize socially and have benefits for doing so, we are talking about organziation complex enough to evolve into civilizations, with political economies, sapience, and the "evolution" of the species externalized outside of simply biology. People are generally pretty biologically similar to those of thousands of years ago, so its the social organization and economics that have evolved.
Water isnt good for tool use, cooking, or agriculture on the primitive scale, making it a barrier for higher conciousness and social organization
mining, metallurgy, farming, structure building etc is simply not viable underwater.
we evolved on land not by chance, but because land had all the things needed to evolve
>>829782>>829777You're a bit foolish to draw conclusions from a dataset of exactly one (1) civilization. We need to send huge telescopes in space and look out there to get any sort of theory that isn't complete garbage tbh
>>829717They would be primitive communist because they would never develop agriculture either. They would be hunter-gatherers forever, but even hunter-gatherer might be too far because they also likely wouldn't be able to gather or store anything.
>>829791you dont need a dataset when you know the fundemental laws of development. Grasp the mechanics well enough and you can know without data. Any such civilizations would need conditions that would redefine what it even means to be aquatic in contradiction to terrestrial
Air breathing gang 4 lyfe uygha
>>829793You can't deduce the fundamental laws of civilization development from mechanics and shit otherwise we could predict the weather from our understanding of atoms and we can't even predict the weather because it's too complex. We need more samples or it's just idealist human particularism with muh Goldilocks and shit
Quarren were revolutionary
Mon calamari reformists and revisionists
>Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems likely that the vast majority of life in the universe is aquatic, taking into account that the vast majority of habitable planets are ocean planets.
the assumptions we can make about what exists on planets beyond our solar system are pretty much limited to the lowest level structures like elements and simple inorganic molecules and minerals and things of that nature. when it comes to life, we have no idea what is possible and what might exist out there, we haven't even really explored the lifeforms of our own planet, we have only discovered about 15% of all the species that exist on earth. and we don't even really know how to define "life", we still can't decide whether viruses constitute life or not, our conception of life is just a few things that we have found and studied on earth over the years and it tells us absolutely nothing about what might exist beyond the solar system or might exist right here in our solar system but we're not sophisticated to detect it or identify it as life. for all we know the radiation belts around jupiter could be a living thing, the omnipresent neutrinos or dark matter permeating our world and passing straight through our matter every second that we are incapable of observing or interacting with at all could contain forms of life, life is such a broad and nebulous concept that we can't even begin to speculate on what is really possible when it comes to life.
>>829794but anon we do predict the weather and are actively improving upon it each year. Apart from the ops to influence the weather, its entirely likely we will have pretty accurate predictions within a century or two
Paradoxically, understanding complex beings and their civilizations is easier than atoms and nuerons, because the civilizations are larger, easier to see, easier to be hands on with.
Understanding why humans developed civilization is much easier than understanding all atomic motion. The more fundemental a truth is, the harder it can be to discover.
>>829819Dog, how do they write stuff? How do you write anything down underwater? How do you progress in any branch of knowledge without writing?
>>829819>>829820you're making the assumption that using external instruments is an essential part of intelligence but that's not necessarily true. sperm whales don't need to write anything down to store information, they can just sing it and the sound wave will propagate across thousands of miles of ocean and get relayed all over the global network of other sperm whales and be memorized and stored throughout the entire network like a bittorrent file. european civilization couldn't figure out how to sail across oceans until they invented tools like the magnetic compass and the astrolabe and giant sophisticated sailing ships during the renaissance, but like 5000+ years ago people on the other side of the world were sailing across the pacific in kayaks and canoes made of sticks and bones and hides and no external navigational tools, they learned how to read the sky with their eyes and feel the sea with their bodies through the hull of the boat and intuit where they were and which direction they were going in and where other islands/continents were all through mental intuition and songs and chants they memorized and passed down for generations. when westerners first encountered these people and saw what they could do they thought they were witches using some kind of evil demonic magic and to this day neurologists still cannot figure out exactly how their brains were able to do these kinds of things. the brain is vastly more complex and powerful than any crafted tool and we often take it for granted and we have yet to even scratch the surface of how our own human brains work, nevermind the brains of gigantic cetaceans that are orders of magnitude greater in size and are capable of forms of natural communication that we couldn't even imagine.
>>829821no we are assuming that intelligence is capped by a lack of tool use
eventually you have to evolve externally and cant rely on biology and oral tradition
>>829822and you're basing that on what? what other intelligent species besides humans on earth have you seen to have enough data to form such a firm opinion on what is required for intelligence?
>>829823I'm the other guy and I'm not debating about what abstract intelligence can be derived. It's possible whales are smarter than humans, but your post was talking about technology and tools:
>>829819>The tool breeders in all tomorrows breeded tools with genetic engineering with the basis for this being a bunch of mutualisms before achieving sapience.And they did this before sapience even? Humans were sapient before they had much in the ways of tools and technology as well.
>>829823stop talking like a liberal
data this data that, science is not statistics.
They are useful, but what we know about evolutionary biology, anthropology, and the more fundemental meaning of civilization itself tells us that external tool use, writing, cooking, agriculture are all fundemental to civilization. Its how we define civilization and higher intelligence itself. Without tools you are limited to the incredibly slow process of random genetic mutation, which takes sooooo fucking long, too long to be stable enough to not get wiped by a major event
>>829825a dung beetle probably assumes every other intelligent species in the universe eats shit as well
>>829827if dung beetles were the smartest animal on the planet, their would be some reason why eating shit made them smarter
>>829824>It's possible whales are smarter than humansor it's possible that "smarter" and "intelligent species" are not meaningful concepts at all, humans are "smart" at doing the kinds of things that humans do and consider important, whales are "smart" at doing whale things, any line of discussion that tries to prove why human intelligence is superior to any other kind of intelligence by listing off all of our amazing feats of bending the world to human will just invariably lead to someone mentioning global warming or environmental pollution or the ongoing threat and historical near-misses of nuclear holocaust or any of the other monumentally stupid things human "intelligence" is responsible for. it's a zero-sum game.
>>829830Did you not read the rest where I was referring to technological development? Whales are actually a perfect example too. Whales are obviously smarter than fish, but at the end of the day, they live almost exactly like fish don't they? They can be smart as or smarter than humans and at the end of the day, what can they do with that intelligence in the ocean?
>>829830there are human tribes which have a genuine level of stability that they didnt push past primitive communism. Nobody would call them retarded, but their stability is exactly what kept them from evolving more complex social order.
I think whales and dolphins are similar.
The inability to explore and understsnd the greater reality outside of their habitat is partially why they have a limit to their possible inteligence.
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