There’s also an important difference in their environment. Underwater (oceans, seas, lagoons) seems much more poor. There are no trees underwater to climb on, branches or sticks of which could be used for tools, you can’t use gravity to devise traps, there’s no fire, much simpler geology, lithe prospects for farming, etc.
I wonder—if an underwater civilisation were to arise, would they consider an open-air civilisation impossible?
“You’re stuck crawling around in a mere two dimensions, unless you put a lot of evolutionary effort into wings, but then you have terrible weight limits on the size of the brain; you can’t assign land to kelp farms and then live in the area above it, so total population is severely limited; and every couple of centuries or so a tsunami will come and wipe out anything built along the coast...”
It’s hard to evaluate for the same reason it’s hard to evaluate whether off-world life could be non-carbon/water-based (maybe we just don’t have the imagination), but I think that excluding humans, land-based ‘civilization’ would still look superior on the merits of what animals and other creatures have done. If we look at compilations of tool use like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals land life dominates.
Complex sea life mostly consists of octopuses and cetaceans; the former seem to only use rudimentary tools for shelter, while the latter do ‘bubble netting’ (interesting but not a step towards anything), nose protection with sponges (proto-clothing?), and shells as scoops. Otters hammer open sea urchins with rocks, similar to some fishes. Further, they’re cut off from sea sources of metal and minerals like deep-sea vents—dolphins can’t go that deep.
In contrast, land life has tool use spread over all sorts of creatures from insects to birds. They benefit from sharp unworn stones (smashing, throwing), abundant sticks and thorns (which can be used in all sorts of ways—picking up termites, jabbing for fish, measuring water depth, impaling & storing prey like the shrikes, walking sticks, bridges, digging, cleaning nails & ears, etc); and many of those uses make little sense in water—you can hardly drop or throw a big stone in the ocean—which also means the rewards to tool use are lower.
termite mounds, wasp and beehives, burrow complexes of rodents, beaver dams, elaborate nests of birds, and webs of spiders...These constructions may arise from complex building behaviour of animals such as in the case of night-time nests for chimpanzees,[2] from inbuilt neural responses, which feature prominently in the construction of bird songs, or triggered by hormone release as in the case of domestic sows,[3] or as emergent properties from simple instinctive responses and interactions, as exhibited by termites, or combinations of these.[4] The process of building such structures may involve learning and communication,[4] and in some cases, even aesthetics.[5] Tool use may also be involved in building structures by animals.[6]...building behaviour is common in many mammals, birds, insects and arachnids. It is also seen in a few species of fish, reptiles, amphibians, molluscs, urochordates, crustaceans, annelids and some other arthropods. It is virtually absent from all the other animal phyla.[6]
So in other words, it’s almost exclusively a land animal thing; it’s not that you can’t build structures in the sea, but that it doesn’t make sense for most creatures—such as otters or cetaceans, which were some of our best candidates. This loses out on more benefits from tool use.
And then there’s the issue that the sea seems to punish big-brained animals: cetaceans and octopuses may have high encephalization quotients, but what else at sea does?
So I think if aliens were to come to earth a million years ago and poke around the ocean and land, they would note that a variety of the species on land seem to be using a lot of tools in all sorts of ways and often building structures and their brains tend to be fairly big, and conclude that yes, it looks like the land really is better for the activities closest to technology—after all, if the sea is so great, why aren’t the creatures there doing much?
You make a very compelling argument, and on balance I think that you are probably correct in your conclusions.
Part of it may be because, for a land animal, the ground is always there. There’s always a strong probability of a rock at your feet to pick up. For sea creatures, it’s possible (in theory) to wander around for months without seeing another solid object. So, land animals have less space to move about in, but have an easier time finding simple tools.
This, of course, relies on the idea that tools—unliving lumps of matter used for a purpose—are a necessary component of a civilisation. It goes without saying that tools are a necessary component of our civilisation; but are they a necessary component of all possible civilisations?
The theoretical underwater civilisation has one thing in great abundance—space. The oceans cover three-quarters of our planet, and sea creatures can move up and down easily enough. Is there any way that that space can be used, as a foundation for some form of aquatic civilisation?
Thinking about bubble netting—it should be possible for dolphins to practice a form of agriculture, herding and taming schools of edible fish, much like shepherds. (I believe ants do something similar with aphids, and I’m pretty sure a dolphin is more intelligent than an ant). Once one has shepherds, one can easily move towards the idea of breeding fish for a purpose—breeding big fish with big fish to get bigger fish, for example. Or breeding tasty with tasty to get tastier. There’s certainly space in the oceans for the dolphins to create a lot of fish farms… and then for these fish farms to swap and interbreed particularly interesting lines.
I’m not quite sure how to believably get beyond a basic agricultural/nomadic existence, though. (Unless perhaps the dolphins start breeding intelligent octopi with intelligent octopi to get more intelligent octopi or something along those lines).
Dolphins are able to herd schools of fish, cooperating to keep a ‘ball’ of fish together for a long time while feeding from it.
However, taming and sustained breeding is a long way from herding behavior—it requires long term planning for multi-year time periods, and I’m not sure if that has been observed in dolphins.
There’s also an important difference in their environment. Underwater (oceans, seas, lagoons) seems much more poor. There are no trees underwater to climb on, branches or sticks of which could be used for tools, you can’t use gravity to devise traps, there’s no fire, much simpler geology, lithe prospects for farming, etc.
I wonder—if an underwater civilisation were to arise, would they consider an open-air civilisation impossible?
“You’re stuck crawling around in a mere two dimensions, unless you put a lot of evolutionary effort into wings, but then you have terrible weight limits on the size of the brain; you can’t assign land to kelp farms and then live in the area above it, so total population is severely limited; and every couple of centuries or so a tsunami will come and wipe out anything built along the coast...”
It’s hard to evaluate for the same reason it’s hard to evaluate whether off-world life could be non-carbon/water-based (maybe we just don’t have the imagination), but I think that excluding humans, land-based ‘civilization’ would still look superior on the merits of what animals and other creatures have done. If we look at compilations of tool use like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals land life dominates.
Complex sea life mostly consists of octopuses and cetaceans; the former seem to only use rudimentary tools for shelter, while the latter do ‘bubble netting’ (interesting but not a step towards anything), nose protection with sponges (proto-clothing?), and shells as scoops. Otters hammer open sea urchins with rocks, similar to some fishes. Further, they’re cut off from sea sources of metal and minerals like deep-sea vents—dolphins can’t go that deep.
In contrast, land life has tool use spread over all sorts of creatures from insects to birds. They benefit from sharp unworn stones (smashing, throwing), abundant sticks and thorns (which can be used in all sorts of ways—picking up termites, jabbing for fish, measuring water depth, impaling & storing prey like the shrikes, walking sticks, bridges, digging, cleaning nails & ears, etc); and many of those uses make little sense in water—you can hardly drop or throw a big stone in the ocean—which also means the rewards to tool use are lower.
Then we pass from tool use to structure building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structures_built_by_animals
So in other words, it’s almost exclusively a land animal thing; it’s not that you can’t build structures in the sea, but that it doesn’t make sense for most creatures—such as otters or cetaceans, which were some of our best candidates. This loses out on more benefits from tool use.
And then there’s the issue that the sea seems to punish big-brained animals: cetaceans and octopuses may have high encephalization quotients, but what else at sea does?
So I think if aliens were to come to earth a million years ago and poke around the ocean and land, they would note that a variety of the species on land seem to be using a lot of tools in all sorts of ways and often building structures and their brains tend to be fairly big, and conclude that yes, it looks like the land really is better for the activities closest to technology—after all, if the sea is so great, why aren’t the creatures there doing much?
You make a very compelling argument, and on balance I think that you are probably correct in your conclusions.
Part of it may be because, for a land animal, the ground is always there. There’s always a strong probability of a rock at your feet to pick up. For sea creatures, it’s possible (in theory) to wander around for months without seeing another solid object. So, land animals have less space to move about in, but have an easier time finding simple tools.
This, of course, relies on the idea that tools—unliving lumps of matter used for a purpose—are a necessary component of a civilisation. It goes without saying that tools are a necessary component of our civilisation; but are they a necessary component of all possible civilisations?
The theoretical underwater civilisation has one thing in great abundance—space. The oceans cover three-quarters of our planet, and sea creatures can move up and down easily enough. Is there any way that that space can be used, as a foundation for some form of aquatic civilisation?
Thinking about bubble netting—it should be possible for dolphins to practice a form of agriculture, herding and taming schools of edible fish, much like shepherds. (I believe ants do something similar with aphids, and I’m pretty sure a dolphin is more intelligent than an ant). Once one has shepherds, one can easily move towards the idea of breeding fish for a purpose—breeding big fish with big fish to get bigger fish, for example. Or breeding tasty with tasty to get tastier. There’s certainly space in the oceans for the dolphins to create a lot of fish farms… and then for these fish farms to swap and interbreed particularly interesting lines.
I’m not quite sure how to believably get beyond a basic agricultural/nomadic existence, though. (Unless perhaps the dolphins start breeding intelligent octopi with intelligent octopi to get more intelligent octopi or something along those lines).
Dolphins are able to herd schools of fish, cooperating to keep a ‘ball’ of fish together for a long time while feeding from it.
However, taming and sustained breeding is a long way from herding behavior—it requires long term planning for multi-year time periods, and I’m not sure if that has been observed in dolphins.
Kelp and fish can be farmed.