Mostly I expect creative surprises based on overall impression about the power of engineering. Let’s try to do a bit of exploratory engineering, consider projects that include steps that are clearly suboptimal, but seem like they could do the trick. (A practicing engineer or ten years of planning would improve this dramatically, removing stupid assumptions and finding better alternatives; a hundred thousand years of actually working on the subprojects will do even better.)
Initially, power can be provided by pulling strong vines (some kind of seaweed will probably work) attached together. It should be possible to farm trees somewhere on the shoreline, if you don’t mind waiting a few decades (not sure if there are any useful underwater plants, but there could be). A saw could be made of something like a shark jaw with vines attached to the sides, so that it can be dragged back and forth. This could be used to make wooden supporting structures that help with improving control of what kind of change is inflicted on the material by a saw. Eventually, incremental improvements in control and precision of saws would allow getting to something functionally similar to sawmills, bonecraft and woodcraft tools.
These enable screws, joints, jars and all kinds of basic mechanical components, which can be used in the construction of tools for controlling things on surfaces of rafts, so that in principle it becomes possible to do anything there given enough woodcrafting and bonecrafting work. At this point we also probably have fire and can use tides to power simple machinery, so that it’s practical to create bigger controlled environments and study chemistry and materials. And we get concrete/cement to create watertight buildings and possibly canals with locks for land access. Something like ironsand or ores from surface exploration can be used to initially get metal and develop precision tools, at which point we get electricity and more powerful chemistry capable of extracting all kinds of things from available materials, however inefficiently. After that, there doesn’t appear to be much difference from what’s available to humans.
I think the basic problem here is that I have to proove a negative, which is, as we all know, impossible. Thus I am pretty much reduced to debating your suggestions. This will sound quite nitpicky but is not meant as an offense, but to demonstrate, where the difficulties would be:
Initially, power can be provided by pulling strong vines (some kind of seaweed will probably work) attached together.
Power to what? Whatever it is it has to be build without hands !!! and with very basic tools. No Seeweed would not work, because there is no evolutionary pressure on aquatic plants to build the strong supportive structures we use from terrestrial plants.
It should be possible to farm trees somewhere on the shoreline
No, trees do not grow in salty environment (except mangroves). How does a dolphin plant, and harvest mangroves without hands and without an axe or a saw (see below).
A saw could be made of something like a shark jaw with vines attached to the sides, so that it can be dragged back and forth.
No it can not: Shark teeth would break quickly and even if they would not, they do not have the correct form to saw wood. Humans allmost exclusively used axes and knives for woodcrafting before the advent of advanced metallurgy. And you do not get wines.
These enable screws, joints, jars and all kinds of basic mechanical components, which can be used in the construction of tools for controlling things on surfaces of rafts, so that in principle it becomes possible to do anything there given enough woodcrafting and bonecrafting work. At this point we also probably have fire and can use tides to power simple machinery, so that it’s practical to create bigger controlled environments and study chemistry and materials.
I think you severely underestimate just how helpless a dolphin would be on such a raft or are we talking remote operation? Without metall? Without precision tools? (I mean real 19th century precision tools—lathe, milling cutter and so on, not stone age “precision tools”)
To get land access and do uesful work there (gather wood, create fire, smelt metal ect.) a dolphin would imho need something like a powered exoskeleton controlled perhaps by fin movement or better by DNI. Modern humanity might perhaps be able to build something to enable a dolphin to work on land, but not a medival or a stone age human civilisation and certainly not a stone age civilisation without hands.
I hope I have brought across which kind of difficulties I think would prevent your dolphin engineers from ever getting anywhere. If you disagree on a certain point I am willing to discuss it in greater detail
I think the basic problem here is that I have to prove a negative, which is, as we all know, impossible.
It’s not impossible. Significant evidence of the negative will be obtained if performing a thorough investigation (which would be expected to solve the problem if it can be solved) fails to solve the problem. Applying this to flaws in particular steps, the useful goal is to show that something can’t be done (that we won’t find an alternative solution), not just that something won’t work if done in a particular way.
For constructing a plan, I have another idea. Start with the simpler problem of developing technology as dolphins with hands. This hypothetical isolates the problem of dealing with underwater environment, from the problem of dealing with absence of hands.
Let’s suppose that it’s possible to solve this simpler problem. Then, I’m not sure that when we have a particular tiny operation that could be performed with hands (a step in the process of developing technology by dolphins with hands, such as smashing something with something else, or tying a knot), it’s impossible to reproduce it without hands (much more laborously, slowly, using more people). Can you come up with a particular example of a very simple action that can be performed with hands (underwater, etc.), which doesn’t look like it can be reduced to working without hands?
Go to a prehistoric museum, even the simplest items you see (stones tied to sticks very securely for example) are not at all easy to do with your hands and are going to be so hard to do with just the snouts that they could be deemed impossible (and would be properly impossible if you consider e.g. the rate of decay of your materials combined with the minimum time to build it, or the like. Sufficient difficulty is impossibility). It’s not that you can’t tie some knot, it’s that you can’t do so reliably and with high precision in the spot where you need it.
I think we can all agree that the difficulty gap is absolutely immense. Perhaps dolphin bodies, with no magical knowledge, could do it, but at an intelligence level that is utterly, immensely superhuman.
It’s not impossible. Significant evidence of the negative will be obtained if performing a thorough investigation (which would be expected to solve the problem if it can be solved) fails to solve the problem.
You could allways argue that we are both not creative / inteligent enough to find a solution and that this is not indicative that a whole society would not find a solution. And this argument may well be correct.
Start with the simpler problem of developing technology as dolphins with hands.
What does that even mean? A dolphin body with functional human arms and a human brain attached and the necessary modifications to make that work? Well now you have got more or less a meremaid with very substantial terrestrial capabilities (well exeeding those of a seal; watch this to get an impression of what I mean ). A group of creatures like that with general knowledge of science might well make it.
Now imagine this creature as strictly waterbound and I think even in this much simpeler problem we can identify a major showstopper: Iron smelting. Imagine this meremaid civilsation with propper hands, and flintstone tools (Can flintstone be found in the oceans? I don’t know) and modern scientific knowledge trying to light a fire. They gather mangrooves using their flint axes, build a raft and throw some wood atop to dry. What now? They cannot board the raft to strike or drill fire so they might try to bulid a mirror to use sunlight. Humans did not do that, but they did not know science, so granted. How do they build it without glass or metal? I don’t know, but let’s say they manage. So now they have fire, not controlled fire, but a bonfire atop a wooden raft. But they don’t need a bonfire they need something like a bloomery and then they need to do some very serious smithing only to build something like a very crude excavator arm to do very basic manipulations in a terrestrial environment. And you cannot do smithing under water.
Let’s suppose that it’s possible to solve this simpler problem … Can you come up with a particular example of a very simple action that can be performed with hands (underwater, etc.), which doesn’t look like it can be reduced to working without hands?
Can you imagine a way a group of quadruplegics ( imho a good aproximation of a stranded dolphin with a human brain—except that their skin does not dry out - ) could fell a tree with stone tools? And delimb it? And bring it to the construction site? And erect it as a pillar?
Can you imagine a way a group of quadruplegics ( imho a good aproximation of a stranded dolphin with a human brain—except that their skin does not dry out - ) could fell a tree with stone tools?
I don’t know about quadruplegics, but I can imagine a way that a group of dolphins might be able to fell a tree using only stone tools and a bit of seaweed.
First, they would need a suitable tree. One that grows near the water (probably near a river they can swim up) where it’s easy enough to get to (and other dolphins can stay in the river and splash the woodcutter to prevent his skin from drying out).
Then, they need a stone axehead. This can be made, fairly laboriously, using only stone; chipping away until is is the right shape and sharp enough.
The dolphins then elect one of their number to be the woodcutter, and use the kelp to tie the axehead to his tail, at a carefully chosen angle. (This part can be done underwater, where the dolphin(s) tying the knots can swim around at all angles to get the kelp in position; another dolphin would probably need to hold the axehead in position while this is going on).
A dolphin’s tail can certainly swing back and forth (or, up and down) with some force, as this motion is used when swimming. So the woodcutter would then need to climb out of the water, turn on his side, and strike the tree repeatedly with the axehead...
If he has a better idea of what he’s doing than I would, he may even be able to arrange for the tree to fall into the river, at which point transportation is comparatively easily handled.
You could always argue that we are both not creative / intelligent enough to find a solution and that this is not indicative that a whole society would not find a solution. And this argument may well be correct.
Given an expectation of how hard it is to solve the problem if it can be solved, inability to solve it with given effort produces corresponding evidence of impossibility of solving the problem. Not responding to inability to solve the problem amounts to actually expecting the problem to be very hard. If I don’t expect that, I would be wrong in suggesting that inability to solve the problem is not evidence for impossibility of solving it.
Another framing is to generalize “inability to solve the problem” upon the conclusion of the project, to a situation where the expectation that the problem can be solved eventually is reduced. Correspondingly, generalize “ability to solve the problem” with expectation having gone up upon the project’s conclusion. This way, it’s clear by conservation of expected evidence that you can’t expect that the estimate for the probability that the problem is solvable will go in a particular direction upon the conclusion of the project. Either the expectation will go up (and so the project produces evidence of the possibility of eventually solving the problem), or else it must go down (and so you gain that elusive evidence of the negative).
Can you imagine a way a group of quadriplegics (imho a good aproximation of a stranded dolphin with a human brain—except that their skin does not dry out - ) could fell a tree with stone tools? And delimb it? And bring it to the construction site? And erect it as a pillar?
Sure, depending on what you are thinking about as the reference procedure of, say, chopping down a tree when using hands. Dolphins with hands won’t just be swinging an axe on the surface, as they would first need to solve the problem of being able to move around, so I’m responding to the analogy with humans who have to do the task without hands, but do have legs. For dolphins, we would need to start with the reference procedure where it’s clear how dolphins with hands can do something.
To chop down a tree, you need to strike it repeatedly with an axe (this is what I assume you meant). To strike it repeatedly, you need to be able to strike it once. It’s such actions as striking a tree with an axe once that I meant as something that I expect can be reduced.
Let’s make the handle of the axe a much longer stick, and also attach another stick perpendicularly to control the tilt of the head of the axe, so that it’s possible to make sure that the blade is turned in the correct direction without having to apply torque directly to the handle. The long handle can be placed on top of a third stick perpendicular to it, and ride along that third stick, with the end (knob) of the handle fixed in place. When it does so, the head of the axe swings. Now, if we let the head of the axe fall under its weight while guided by (“riding” on) the third stick, or alternatively pull it in order for the axe to gain the necessary speed, and use the second stick to direct the blade, the result is the axe head striking the tree with the blade at sufficient speed to dent it. Perhaps such method would be a hundred times slower, so that it would take a year to do a job that would otherwise take a day, and that is just what I meant by the process being much less efficient, more laborous.
Now imagine this creature as strictly waterbound
(Not sure what you mean by “strictly waterbound”, though this distinction doesn’t seem important for this discussion. The hypothetical considers creatures that are like dolphins in all relevant respects excepts they also have hands (maybe as additional retractable limbs, to preserve swimming capabilities). So they should be about as waterbound as dolphins. If this hypothetical allows technology, we could pose the more difficult problem of developing technology without the ability to surface even for a short time (which dolphins have).)
Given an expectation of how hard it is to solve the problem....
Agreed
… like dolphins in all relevant respects excepts they also have hands (maybe as additional retractable limbs, to preserve swimming capabilities). So they should be about as waterbound as dolphins.
No they are not. They are much less waterbound than seals (watch the video), because they can move around on their hands and use their hands to cover themselves with seaweeds or somesuch to protect against drying / sun. I fully agree with you that such creatures are can bootstrap a civilisation especially if they have scientific knowledge.
Where I disagree is the point where an unmodified dolphin or a strictly waterbound (arbitrarily defined as cannot leave the water for more than 5 seconds) “dolphin with hands” gets anything done on the surface without having significant technology to start with (arbitrarily defined as anything humans could not build 40000 years ago). They would run into the problem that they have to build complex contraptions
Let’s make the handle of the axe a much longer stick, and also attach another stick perpendicularly...
to perform simple tasks (felling a tree) without being able to build those complex contraptions without the help of even more complex contraptions (You cannot build what you described in the above quote without having wood and being able to work with it—and do that in a terrestrial environment, where you can not do anything in the first place, because you can not move.).
For example, out of animal skins. This construction is supported by internal pressure, it does not need strength.
More to the point, why would they want to? What would drive them to do so?
Want exactly what? If “smelt metal”, then probably the same as humans, accidentally placing copper or tin ore in furnace. If “having underwater furnace”—it is easier to operate than one placed on raft. If “why use fire at all”—to make watertight pottery.
Mostly I expect creative surprises based on overall impression about the power of engineering. Let’s try to do a bit of exploratory engineering, consider projects that include steps that are clearly suboptimal, but seem like they could do the trick. (A practicing engineer or ten years of planning would improve this dramatically, removing stupid assumptions and finding better alternatives; a hundred thousand years of actually working on the subprojects will do even better.)
Initially, power can be provided by pulling strong vines (some kind of seaweed will probably work) attached together. It should be possible to farm trees somewhere on the shoreline, if you don’t mind waiting a few decades (not sure if there are any useful underwater plants, but there could be). A saw could be made of something like a shark jaw with vines attached to the sides, so that it can be dragged back and forth. This could be used to make wooden supporting structures that help with improving control of what kind of change is inflicted on the material by a saw. Eventually, incremental improvements in control and precision of saws would allow getting to something functionally similar to sawmills, bonecraft and woodcraft tools.
These enable screws, joints, jars and all kinds of basic mechanical components, which can be used in the construction of tools for controlling things on surfaces of rafts, so that in principle it becomes possible to do anything there given enough woodcrafting and bonecrafting work. At this point we also probably have fire and can use tides to power simple machinery, so that it’s practical to create bigger controlled environments and study chemistry and materials. And we get concrete/cement to create watertight buildings and possibly canals with locks for land access. Something like ironsand or ores from surface exploration can be used to initially get metal and develop precision tools, at which point we get electricity and more powerful chemistry capable of extracting all kinds of things from available materials, however inefficiently. After that, there doesn’t appear to be much difference from what’s available to humans.
I think the basic problem here is that I have to proove a negative, which is, as we all know, impossible. Thus I am pretty much reduced to debating your suggestions. This will sound quite nitpicky but is not meant as an offense, but to demonstrate, where the difficulties would be:
Power to what? Whatever it is it has to be build without hands !!! and with very basic tools. No Seeweed would not work, because there is no evolutionary pressure on aquatic plants to build the strong supportive structures we use from terrestrial plants.
No, trees do not grow in salty environment (except mangroves). How does a dolphin plant, and harvest mangroves without hands and without an axe or a saw (see below).
No it can not: Shark teeth would break quickly and even if they would not, they do not have the correct form to saw wood. Humans allmost exclusively used axes and knives for woodcrafting before the advent of advanced metallurgy. And you do not get wines.
I think you severely underestimate just how helpless a dolphin would be on such a raft or are we talking remote operation? Without metall? Without precision tools? (I mean real 19th century precision tools—lathe, milling cutter and so on, not stone age “precision tools”)
To get land access and do uesful work there (gather wood, create fire, smelt metal ect.) a dolphin would imho need something like a powered exoskeleton controlled perhaps by fin movement or better by DNI. Modern humanity might perhaps be able to build something to enable a dolphin to work on land, but not a medival or a stone age human civilisation and certainly not a stone age civilisation without hands.
I hope I have brought across which kind of difficulties I think would prevent your dolphin engineers from ever getting anywhere. If you disagree on a certain point I am willing to discuss it in greater detail
It’s not impossible. Significant evidence of the negative will be obtained if performing a thorough investigation (which would be expected to solve the problem if it can be solved) fails to solve the problem. Applying this to flaws in particular steps, the useful goal is to show that something can’t be done (that we won’t find an alternative solution), not just that something won’t work if done in a particular way.
For constructing a plan, I have another idea. Start with the simpler problem of developing technology as dolphins with hands. This hypothetical isolates the problem of dealing with underwater environment, from the problem of dealing with absence of hands.
Let’s suppose that it’s possible to solve this simpler problem. Then, I’m not sure that when we have a particular tiny operation that could be performed with hands (a step in the process of developing technology by dolphins with hands, such as smashing something with something else, or tying a knot), it’s impossible to reproduce it without hands (much more laborously, slowly, using more people). Can you come up with a particular example of a very simple action that can be performed with hands (underwater, etc.), which doesn’t look like it can be reduced to working without hands?
Go to a prehistoric museum, even the simplest items you see (stones tied to sticks very securely for example) are not at all easy to do with your hands and are going to be so hard to do with just the snouts that they could be deemed impossible (and would be properly impossible if you consider e.g. the rate of decay of your materials combined with the minimum time to build it, or the like. Sufficient difficulty is impossibility). It’s not that you can’t tie some knot, it’s that you can’t do so reliably and with high precision in the spot where you need it.
I think we can all agree that the difficulty gap is absolutely immense. Perhaps dolphin bodies, with no magical knowledge, could do it, but at an intelligence level that is utterly, immensely superhuman.
You could allways argue that we are both not creative / inteligent enough to find a solution and that this is not indicative that a whole society would not find a solution. And this argument may well be correct.
What does that even mean? A dolphin body with functional human arms and a human brain attached and the necessary modifications to make that work? Well now you have got more or less a meremaid with very substantial terrestrial capabilities (well exeeding those of a seal; watch this to get an impression of what I mean ). A group of creatures like that with general knowledge of science might well make it.
Now imagine this creature as strictly waterbound and I think even in this much simpeler problem we can identify a major showstopper: Iron smelting. Imagine this meremaid civilsation with propper hands, and flintstone tools (Can flintstone be found in the oceans? I don’t know) and modern scientific knowledge trying to light a fire. They gather mangrooves using their flint axes, build a raft and throw some wood atop to dry. What now? They cannot board the raft to strike or drill fire so they might try to bulid a mirror to use sunlight. Humans did not do that, but they did not know science, so granted. How do they build it without glass or metal? I don’t know, but let’s say they manage. So now they have fire, not controlled fire, but a bonfire atop a wooden raft. But they don’t need a bonfire they need something like a bloomery and then they need to do some very serious smithing only to build something like a very crude excavator arm to do very basic manipulations in a terrestrial environment. And you cannot do smithing under water.
Can you imagine a way a group of quadruplegics ( imho a good aproximation of a stranded dolphin with a human brain—except that their skin does not dry out - ) could fell a tree with stone tools? And delimb it? And bring it to the construction site? And erect it as a pillar?
I don’t know about quadruplegics, but I can imagine a way that a group of dolphins might be able to fell a tree using only stone tools and a bit of seaweed.
First, they would need a suitable tree. One that grows near the water (probably near a river they can swim up) where it’s easy enough to get to (and other dolphins can stay in the river and splash the woodcutter to prevent his skin from drying out).
Then, they need a stone axehead. This can be made, fairly laboriously, using only stone; chipping away until is is the right shape and sharp enough.
The dolphins then elect one of their number to be the woodcutter, and use the kelp to tie the axehead to his tail, at a carefully chosen angle. (This part can be done underwater, where the dolphin(s) tying the knots can swim around at all angles to get the kelp in position; another dolphin would probably need to hold the axehead in position while this is going on).
A dolphin’s tail can certainly swing back and forth (or, up and down) with some force, as this motion is used when swimming. So the woodcutter would then need to climb out of the water, turn on his side, and strike the tree repeatedly with the axehead...
If he has a better idea of what he’s doing than I would, he may even be able to arrange for the tree to fall into the river, at which point transportation is comparatively easily handled.
Given an expectation of how hard it is to solve the problem if it can be solved, inability to solve it with given effort produces corresponding evidence of impossibility of solving the problem. Not responding to inability to solve the problem amounts to actually expecting the problem to be very hard. If I don’t expect that, I would be wrong in suggesting that inability to solve the problem is not evidence for impossibility of solving it.
Another framing is to generalize “inability to solve the problem” upon the conclusion of the project, to a situation where the expectation that the problem can be solved eventually is reduced. Correspondingly, generalize “ability to solve the problem” with expectation having gone up upon the project’s conclusion. This way, it’s clear by conservation of expected evidence that you can’t expect that the estimate for the probability that the problem is solvable will go in a particular direction upon the conclusion of the project. Either the expectation will go up (and so the project produces evidence of the possibility of eventually solving the problem), or else it must go down (and so you gain that elusive evidence of the negative).
Sure, depending on what you are thinking about as the reference procedure of, say, chopping down a tree when using hands. Dolphins with hands won’t just be swinging an axe on the surface, as they would first need to solve the problem of being able to move around, so I’m responding to the analogy with humans who have to do the task without hands, but do have legs. For dolphins, we would need to start with the reference procedure where it’s clear how dolphins with hands can do something.
To chop down a tree, you need to strike it repeatedly with an axe (this is what I assume you meant). To strike it repeatedly, you need to be able to strike it once. It’s such actions as striking a tree with an axe once that I meant as something that I expect can be reduced.
Let’s make the handle of the axe a much longer stick, and also attach another stick perpendicularly to control the tilt of the head of the axe, so that it’s possible to make sure that the blade is turned in the correct direction without having to apply torque directly to the handle. The long handle can be placed on top of a third stick perpendicular to it, and ride along that third stick, with the end (knob) of the handle fixed in place. When it does so, the head of the axe swings. Now, if we let the head of the axe fall under its weight while guided by (“riding” on) the third stick, or alternatively pull it in order for the axe to gain the necessary speed, and use the second stick to direct the blade, the result is the axe head striking the tree with the blade at sufficient speed to dent it. Perhaps such method would be a hundred times slower, so that it would take a year to do a job that would otherwise take a day, and that is just what I meant by the process being much less efficient, more laborous.
(Not sure what you mean by “strictly waterbound”, though this distinction doesn’t seem important for this discussion. The hypothetical considers creatures that are like dolphins in all relevant respects excepts they also have hands (maybe as additional retractable limbs, to preserve swimming capabilities). So they should be about as waterbound as dolphins. If this hypothetical allows technology, we could pose the more difficult problem of developing technology without the ability to surface even for a short time (which dolphins have).)
Agreed
No they are not. They are much less waterbound than seals (watch the video), because they can move around on their hands and use their hands to cover themselves with seaweeds or somesuch to protect against drying / sun. I fully agree with you that such creatures are can bootstrap a civilisation especially if they have scientific knowledge.
Where I disagree is the point where an unmodified dolphin or a strictly waterbound (arbitrarily defined as cannot leave the water for more than 5 seconds) “dolphin with hands” gets anything done on the surface without having significant technology to start with (arbitrarily defined as anything humans could not build 40000 years ago). They would run into the problem that they have to build complex contraptions
to perform simple tasks (felling a tree) without being able to build those complex contraptions without the help of even more complex contraptions (You cannot build what you described in the above quote without having wood and being able to work with it—and do that in a terrestrial environment, where you can not do anything in the first place, because you can not move.).
It is not a major problem at all. Given that creatures have hands and can keep them out of water, they can build a bloomery inside a diving bell.
Chicken and egg problem. What are you building the diving bell out of?
More to the point, why would they want to? What would drive them to do so?
For example, out of animal skins. This construction is supported by internal pressure, it does not need strength.
Want exactly what? If “smelt metal”, then probably the same as humans, accidentally placing copper or tin ore in furnace. If “having underwater furnace”—it is easier to operate than one placed on raft. If “why use fire at all”—to make watertight pottery.