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jdw64 3 hours 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 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

aurareturn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Fire, agriculture, electricity, AI.

Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.

vitally3643 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

aozame 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AI is not important at all. Just make things more convenient, but is completely unnecessary.

anonymousiam 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It looks like you've already done so with the order of the sequence that you used.

cmrdporcupine an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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...)

vkou 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

vitally3643 an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

cmrdporcupine an hour ago | parent [-]

There were copper & bronze age industrial sites. Esp Tin & arsenic 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 of industry. And the wage labour system to make it possible. Accompanied by acts of enclosure etc to drive the peasantry off the land and into factories. Also the mechanization of agriculture that went with that.

smilespray 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And a sample size of one.

vitally3643 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's what I said, yes.

nobodyandproud 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We have counter examples of human pods that never really achieved “civilization”.

What’s missing that make them more akin to orcas or wolves?

greiskul an hour ago | parent [-]

It 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 an hour ago | parent [-]

For humans, I wonder if population size and density is also a factor.

That is, if there’s a critical mass and population size.

asdff 30 minutes ago | parent [-]

And 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.

Calavar 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

onlypassingthru 2 hours ago | parent [-]

When did octopuses start breathing air?

Calavar 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Octopuses are smart, but I've yet to see anything that suggests they are smarter than dolphins or whales.

onlypassingthru 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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-...

mapt 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

ekelsen 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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"?).

fhdkweig 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

sarkhan 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

ekelsen 2 hours ago | parent [-]

having arms is probably an advantage in developing tool-use, but who knows!

zahlman 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

card_zero 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Being immersed in solvent can't help with things like graphic arts and pottery.

HarHarVeryFunny 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

1) 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

layer8 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

TheBigSalad 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

nobodyandproud 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.