But how you imagine that would work? How will a longer timespan help?
Let’s picture that we literally took 10 000 top human engineers and scientists, with all our human knowledge, into dolphin bodies, on another planet with no human artefacts. So, our dolphin people now need to somehow develop a way of writing down their knowledge underwater, which they can only do very laboriously because they haven’t got hands. They can write very large letters with immense energy expenditure per letter. They can barely store any knowledge. They also got short lifespan and sharks to worry about.
And on the tools side, you need tools that are good enough so you can use them to make better tools. That generally requires ability to harden things—make something while it’s soft, let it harden, use something softer to crack apart something harder. And to get that started, you need hands, because without hands you can only make the kind of tools that doesn’t help you make better tools.
If you can’t make an improvement in any single generation, you can’t make any improvement in a thousand generations either.
Meanwhile, a planet populated with those same scientists and engineers in human bodies—hell, dog bodies, cat bodies, elephant bodies—would’ve had it all sorted out in no time. They’d have steel, electricity, running water, radio, and so on, in less than a generation—hell even 10 people can do that.
(assuming they all cooperate).
The gap due to the body shape and environment appears utterly immense. The only hope would be that dophins would evolve much greater than human intelligence and come up with something that we can’t come up with (e.g. mind controlling some animal with hands).
edit: That is not to say a small number of top scientists and engineers would single handedly create industrial manufacturing, but that is to say they would re-create pre-industrial village level technology and then hand-make many important bits of 20th century technology. You can take a 16th century blacksmith’s forge and make an electric generator in there, a spark gap transmitter, a coherer receiver, a carbon arc lamp, and the like, using most basic materials and hand manufacturing techniques. Indeed that’s how the early instances of all those things were made—by a small number of top engineers, often in their spare time, without advance knowledge.
Let’s picture that we literally took 10 000 top human engineers and scientists, with all our human knowledge, into dolphin bodies, on another planet with no human artefacts.
That’s a bad start. The issue is not whether intelligent dolphins will be able to replicate human civilization, the issue is whether they might be able to develop their own—one which will look very different from human and which, I suspect, would be largely beyond our imagination at the moment.
The point of the example is to provoke a concrete discussion. Appeals to unimaginable are not very useful. The underwater environment doesn’t seem as conductive to technological visible-from-a-distance civilization, in any case. Dramatically different civilizations may not go into space, and if we are discussing civilizations whose apparent absence in the sky is suspicious, those recreate a huge chunk of our own civilization.
edit: let’s put it this way. The only data point we got on things such as civilization not becoming stagnant, or civilization becoming visible, is our own. The further we go from there the less reason we have to expect those to occur.
Generalizing from the sample of one is where you get the idea that we’ll see them from. edit: let’s just agree that the assumption that aliens would be visible has uncertainties, that are much larger for some really really alien unimaginable aliens.
Meanwhile, a planet populated with those same scientists and engineers in human bodies—hell, dog bodies, cat >bodies, elephant bodies—would’ve had it all sorted out in no time.
Taken literally, no. There will not be any civilization above hunter-gatherers without domesticated plants and animals, and that cannot be done in one generation. Remember that ox and wheat also are human artefacts. Well, realistically (in human variant) most of them will be dead very soon, survivors become nomadic hunters.
And as for the most of them getting dead very soon… I dunno, wildlife survival is not really that hard in general. We only have wildlife left in the regions where it’s very hard for humans to live, so if you drop people into the remaining regions of wilderness, they don’t fare very well. And we didn’t start on the wheat cultivation with the grand plan of going to the moon, we did that because the wheat as it was naturally gave huge and immediate benefits.
I don’t think you’d end up with a culture resembling any culture that existed in history. You have those smartest engineers and scientists, who already know how to make bows, steel, glass, firearms, electrical generators, and so on, and once settled in, they have a lot of free time (because there’s a ton of wildlife—buffalo herds, passenger pigeons, all that other easy to kill stuff that’s extinct—which will take many generations to deplete. They’re not in the modern day wilderness in the region where people can barely survive and almost all the food is extinct. They’re the new predator).
First, hunting with stone age weapons is far fom easy. Second, most engineers and scientists are not hunters, noone of them know how to hunt with spear and almost noone with bow. Third, they have no food supplies and so no time to learn. They will survive olny in very favourable conditions, like on tropical island with plenty of shellfish and tortoises (I think most people can hunt those).
I were thinking of my experience in Russia where engineers, mathematicians, and physicists absolutely loved going out on various nature trips (Didn’t really think of Sheldon and US tv shows). Of course, not everyone did, but we’re dropping a huge number of people, and those who know can teach those who don’t. Healthy person can go for 2 months without food.
Let’s say that they spawn on 1kmx1km zone in a grid with 10m spacing, in the temperate climate in the late spring, clothed in earliest stone age clothing (for same reason why we don’t spawn dolphins into a desert, we don’t spawn people into the Arctic).
If it looks too different, we won’t see them in space, though.
Our own intelligence is at the level where it’s just barely sufficient to build a civilization when you got hands, fire, and so on. Note that orcas have much larger brains than humans, and had those larger brains for quite a long time, yet we’re where we are, and they’re where they are.
Our own intelligence is at the level where it’s just barely sufficient to build a civilization when you got hands, fire, and so on.
Likely because the first beings that could do that, did do that—no need to wait for the evolution of higher intelligence (so, in particular, this doesn’t show that higher intelligence couldn’t evolve).
Yeah, that’s precisely my point. If there’s more obstacles, intelligence has to go further before the technological civilization. We did get higher intelligence but only by other means (e.g. having paper and pencil helps, better nutrition gives higher IQ, and so on).
The Wikipedia article listing number of neurons in the cerebral cortex shows humans as significantly higher than whales, even though raw brain size may look better for whales. Wikipedia also describes an encephalization quotient which takes account of the fact that the brain is used for bodily functions, and on which whales don’t score as highly as they may seem to from brain size.
The Wikipedia article listing number of neurons in the cerebral cortex shows humans as significantly higher than whales, even though raw brain size may look better for whales
Yeah, that’s quite interesting. Raises the question though, why do they not have more neurons? They do have larger glia to neuron ratios, it’s not like everything’s simply bigger. Perhaps aquatic environment simply doesn’t reward intelligence that much.
which takes account of the fact that the brain is used for bodily functions
Well, the bodily functions are the same but occurring at a lower rate, for a larger mammal. Most of whale’s body is fat, anyhow, which doesn’t need to be controlled by brain, and it’s not generally the case that people drop many IQ points when they become overweight. Nor are smaller people with same sized heads more intelligent.
edit: on the other hand, EQ may be a (very crude) measure of how well brain tissue pays off for an animal. If you have high quality brain tissue and you’re in a complex environment, at the equilibrium between costs and benefits you would haul around more brain mass per body mass. With the obvious caveat that this tradeoff is very different between land animals, flying animals, and aquatic animals.
Nor are smaller people with same sized heads more intelligent.
Women are in average approximately as intelligent as men (though it depends on how you weigh visual intelligence vs verbal intelligence, and anyway their variance is smaller) even though they have smaller heads.
But is it because of the smaller body sizes using less brain for the bodily functions? I don’t think so.
edit: I frankly don’t get the point with EQ. If we had to make a computer control for bodily functions (e.g. to grow ethical meat), we could do with a weaker cpu for larger animals because they work slower. It just doesn’t make sense that body size would be using up brain to control it, irrespective of the composition of that body.
Meanwhile, a planet populated with those same scientists and engineers in human bodies—hell, dog bodies, cat >bodies, elephant bodies—would’ve had it all sorted out in no time. They’d have steel, electricity, running water, >radio, and so on, in less than a generation—hell even 10 people can do that.
You greatly underestimate population size nesessary for civilization.
10 people, of course, can’t rebuild the whole civilization, but 10 top scientists and engineers with relevant expertise, given access to the natural resources, can make iron, steel, copper, tooling, build an electric generator, and so on [assuming they don’t get eaten by wildlife early on]. Of course, when they die out, it’s gone with them—the heavily inbred future generations aren’t going to be able to continue that, and probably won’t even survive.
No they cant. For example to make copper you need copper mine workers, smeltery workers, woodcutters, charcoal burners, wagon drivers to transport wood, ore and coal, carpenters to make wagons, builders to build mine and smeltery and farmers to feed them. That is impossible for population less then few thousands at least. Industry nesessary to make a generator requires population in millions.
To make copper, you need copper ore and charcoal and a fire and bellows out of animal hide. Those things weren’t produced in a modern industrial manner until something known as “industrial revolution”. You had a little town, it had a blacksmith, and the blacksmith could smelt his own iron (and copper, if he has the ore, as copper smelting is pretty easy). You’d be surprised how much technology existed entirely locally within a small village.
Heh, yeah. But when you don’t have transportation and it’s just 10 people it may be difficult to find such things without a metal detector… I was just recalling one time I made a little bit of copper from low grade malachite, using a torch. It is really easily reduced from the ore. More easily than iron.
So, our dolphin people now need to somehow develop a way of writing down their knowledge underwater, which they can only do very laboriously because they haven’t got hands.
They don’t need to write it down, they just need to store it. A certain amount of knowledge can be “stored” as oral tradition; alternatively, a lot more knowledge can be stored as (say) a pattern of rocks, carefully gathered and moved into position, in an area that can be easily visited.
Some knowledge will almost certainly be lost in the first few generations, despite that.
Oral traditions decay quickly, though. And rock placement is an example of far higher effort per letter. The point is, they find it much harder to retain knowledge. If the rate of loss is greater than the rate of creation, there’s no progress at all.
And even after you’re storing the knowledge, you’re still entirely out of luck on tools. Even if they have waterproof’d encyclopaedia handed to them, they still have this make tools to make tools to make tools cycle that they can’t even bootstrap.
The point is, putting that side to side with humans in some land animal bodies, you have on one hand a bunch of dolphin people who lost pretty much everything in a few generations, save for a few myths that are of no practical use, and on the other hand you have those land people with electricity, radio, and everything, a good chunk of 20th century tech.
Yes, there would be some significant losses in the first few generations. But if you teleport the top 10 000 scientist and engineers onto an alien world with no human artifacts and leave them in human bodies, there will also be some significant losses in the first few generations. Once data storage technology is able to keep up with the volume of knowledge retained, then the losses will stop, and knowledge will slowly start to be regained.
If they’re sensible, they’ll realise that they can’t retain everything, and put some effort into retaining that which is important.
And even after you’re storing the knowledge, you’re still entirely out of luck on tools. Even if they have waterproof’d encyclopaedia handed to them, they still have this make tools to make tools to make tools cycle that they can’t even bootstrap.
Why not? Hydraulic cement will harden underwater, and can be carefully pressed and moulded into shape. And while I have no idea how dolphins can get to that point, apparently even underwater welding is possible.
’cause nothing they know is particularly useful for future generations. You just get distorted myths, and it doesn’t take much distortion until technical knowledge becomes entirely non trustworthy and thus worthless.
Why not? Hydraulic cement will harden underwater
But can you make hydraulic cement underwater? I was under the impression that you needed fire to make it.
’cause nothing they know is particularly useful for future generations.
Knowing how to make hydraulic cement isn’t useful?
I am quite certain that the 10 000 top engineers and scientists know quite a few things that would be very useful for future generations. Since I am not in that number, and since I am only one person, I do not know what those things would be, but I estimate a high probability that they exist.
But can you make hydraulic cement underwater? I was under the impression that you needed fire to make it.
I’m not sure. The Wikipedia article mentions that the ancient Romans used a mixture of volcanic ash and crushed lime, and you certainly do get underwater volcanoes, so the ash should be available… there are probably industrial processes now, but just mixing volcanic ash with the right sort of mud and getting something that hardens if you leave it for a day or two sounds usable underwater to me.
I do not know what those things would be, but I estimate a high probability that they exist.
But it’s not enough to convey the formulas, you need also to convey the context. And you need to do so reliably, without later generations adding in nonsense of their own. When the knowledge is in use, it’s naturally checked against reality and protected against decay.
re: cement, my understanding is that you still need to fire components to make hydraulic cement, and underwater ash won’t work.
But it’s not enough to convey the formulas, you need also to convey the context. And you need to do so reliably, without later generations adding in nonsense of their own. When the knowledge is in use, it’s naturally checked against reality and protected against decay.
Which means that they will best remember things that they can immediately put to use, yes. Such as how to breed fish for desired characteristics, maybe? Or how to create some basic tools.
But what those tools may be, besides the tools real dolphins already invented? And breeding fish requires some sort of enclosure, ability to manipulate individual fish, etc. It’s not even clear there’s anything to gain from breeding fish if you don’t do some underwater agriculture for fish food (and thus need fish very different from available species to make full use of that).
Perhaps the reasons dolphin’s large brains are not particularly optimized (comparing to ours) in terms of neural density, despite ample time at their brain volume, is that they already do pretty much everything that a greater intellect would do.
On the ground and with the hands, when our intelligence was the same as of dolphins, we had a lot of complex and useful things we could have been doing if we were a little smarter, and that’s how we evolved our intelligence (and conversely, how they didn’t evolve much further).
Not necessarily. For reasons that are completely intuitive, I imagine our top 10 000 scientist et al. would be able to fashion tools, that could be used very effectively.
You make the assumption (albeit loosely) that progress happens along a straight pre-determined path, where things happen in a specific sequence, much like they did in human history. This is far from so. We are talking about a different planet out here. I’m not suggesting that different laws of physics will be applicable.
But the odds are that the oceanography, will be vastly different, with all sorts of different materials that would be available. There’s no guarantee that this planet (from here on called “Dolphin Alpha”) that steel would even exist or the necessary elements are present on the planet. On the other hand, you could possibly have all manner of other material. Perhaps, under water civilization would have a very different set of social rules.
HEAVY USE OF HYPERBOLE FOLLOWS
Given that these are the most brilliant 10 000 scientists that are present on the planet, I’d expect a sizeable number of them to know morse code, which can then be replicated in dolphin sounds (am no expert, but you’d need only two distinguishable sounds if I’ve got the concept correct). A good number more would be experts in Game theory. The homo sapiens dolphinus (again no expert, but this sounds authentic enough to me! How about we call them HSD for short?) that happen to know both morse code and be well versed in the more salient features of Game Theory, would probably rise to political power within the ranks of the HSD, and since these arent politicians who are in it for material gain (that part comes much later in the advent of a civilisation) and are truly interested in the welfare of the civilisation, would probably find ways to domesticate (or if you prefer the harsher equivalent “enslave”), all sorts of smaller creatures that could work for them!!
For the sake of simplicity, if we assume that marine life on Dolhin Alpha evolved roughly in parallel with that of Earth, the Dolphin Alpha Crabs (resembling the ones that live under water not the other type) and Dolphin Alpha Lobsters could work like minions. The HSD could decipher which fish are poisonous and use that knowledge to hunt larger and more meatier underwater species (I was thinking sharks, but that takes experimentation and I somehow see the world’s leading scientists thinking long and hard and then deciding that there are safer options at hand, except for the few who were also born adrenaline junkies and are now flapping their fins in excitement)
Before I get further carried away, I would just like to say that the body shape is something that can be easily overcome.
Whether intelligence would arise to a greater degree, really is a matter up for debate, but I would b inclined to think the answer is no, until the HSD discovers the equivalent of computing.
I have your ‘domesticate other animals’ listed in a footnote. Would take a long time and getting the domesticated animals to the point where they’re a replacement for your hands… that’s on par with a breeding program to regrow your own hands.
The time during which you can make environment easy enough that your intelligence de-evolves.
But how you imagine that would work? How will a longer timespan help?
Let’s picture that we literally took 10 000 top human engineers and scientists, with all our human knowledge, into dolphin bodies, on another planet with no human artefacts. So, our dolphin people now need to somehow develop a way of writing down their knowledge underwater, which they can only do very laboriously because they haven’t got hands. They can write very large letters with immense energy expenditure per letter. They can barely store any knowledge. They also got short lifespan and sharks to worry about.
And on the tools side, you need tools that are good enough so you can use them to make better tools. That generally requires ability to harden things—make something while it’s soft, let it harden, use something softer to crack apart something harder. And to get that started, you need hands, because without hands you can only make the kind of tools that doesn’t help you make better tools.
If you can’t make an improvement in any single generation, you can’t make any improvement in a thousand generations either.
Meanwhile, a planet populated with those same scientists and engineers in human bodies—hell, dog bodies, cat bodies, elephant bodies—would’ve had it all sorted out in no time. They’d have steel, electricity, running water, radio, and so on, in less than a generation—hell even 10 people can do that.
(assuming they all cooperate).
The gap due to the body shape and environment appears utterly immense. The only hope would be that dophins would evolve much greater than human intelligence and come up with something that we can’t come up with (e.g. mind controlling some animal with hands).
edit: That is not to say a small number of top scientists and engineers would single handedly create industrial manufacturing, but that is to say they would re-create pre-industrial village level technology and then hand-make many important bits of 20th century technology. You can take a 16th century blacksmith’s forge and make an electric generator in there, a spark gap transmitter, a coherer receiver, a carbon arc lamp, and the like, using most basic materials and hand manufacturing techniques. Indeed that’s how the early instances of all those things were made—by a small number of top engineers, often in their spare time, without advance knowledge.
That’s a bad start. The issue is not whether intelligent dolphins will be able to replicate human civilization, the issue is whether they might be able to develop their own—one which will look very different from human and which, I suspect, would be largely beyond our imagination at the moment.
The point of the example is to provoke a concrete discussion. Appeals to unimaginable are not very useful. The underwater environment doesn’t seem as conductive to technological visible-from-a-distance civilization, in any case. Dramatically different civilizations may not go into space, and if we are discussing civilizations whose apparent absence in the sky is suspicious, those recreate a huge chunk of our own civilization.
edit: let’s put it this way. The only data point we got on things such as civilization not becoming stagnant, or civilization becoming visible, is our own. The further we go from there the less reason we have to expect those to occur.
I see absolutely no reason for that to be so. Generalizing from the sample of one is foolhardy.
Generalizing from the sample of one is where you get the idea that we’ll see them from. edit: let’s just agree that the assumption that aliens would be visible has uncertainties, that are much larger for some really really alien unimaginable aliens.
Taken literally, no. There will not be any civilization above hunter-gatherers without domesticated plants and animals, and that cannot be done in one generation. Remember that ox and wheat also are human artefacts. Well, realistically (in human variant) most of them will be dead very soon, survivors become nomadic hunters.
Hunter gatherers had a lot of free time, though.
And as for the most of them getting dead very soon… I dunno, wildlife survival is not really that hard in general. We only have wildlife left in the regions where it’s very hard for humans to live, so if you drop people into the remaining regions of wilderness, they don’t fare very well. And we didn’t start on the wheat cultivation with the grand plan of going to the moon, we did that because the wheat as it was naturally gave huge and immediate benefits.
I don’t think you’d end up with a culture resembling any culture that existed in history. You have those smartest engineers and scientists, who already know how to make bows, steel, glass, firearms, electrical generators, and so on, and once settled in, they have a lot of free time (because there’s a ton of wildlife—buffalo herds, passenger pigeons, all that other easy to kill stuff that’s extinct—which will take many generations to deplete. They’re not in the modern day wilderness in the region where people can barely survive and almost all the food is extinct. They’re the new predator).
First, hunting with stone age weapons is far fom easy. Second, most engineers and scientists are not hunters, noone of them know how to hunt with spear and almost noone with bow. Third, they have no food supplies and so no time to learn. They will survive olny in very favourable conditions, like on tropical island with plenty of shellfish and tortoises (I think most people can hunt those).
I were thinking of my experience in Russia where engineers, mathematicians, and physicists absolutely loved going out on various nature trips (Didn’t really think of Sheldon and US tv shows). Of course, not everyone did, but we’re dropping a huge number of people, and those who know can teach those who don’t. Healthy person can go for 2 months without food.
Let’s say that they spawn on 1kmx1km zone in a grid with 10m spacing, in the temperate climate in the late spring, clothed in earliest stone age clothing (for same reason why we don’t spawn dolphins into a desert, we don’t spawn people into the Arctic).
This strikes me as very human centric. Why should another species’ hypothetical ascension look so much like the one we happened to observe in humans?
If it looks too different, we won’t see them in space, though.
Our own intelligence is at the level where it’s just barely sufficient to build a civilization when you got hands, fire, and so on. Note that orcas have much larger brains than humans, and had those larger brains for quite a long time, yet we’re where we are, and they’re where they are.
Likely because the first beings that could do that, did do that—no need to wait for the evolution of higher intelligence (so, in particular, this doesn’t show that higher intelligence couldn’t evolve).
Yeah, that’s precisely my point. If there’s more obstacles, intelligence has to go further before the technological civilization. We did get higher intelligence but only by other means (e.g. having paper and pencil helps, better nutrition gives higher IQ, and so on).
The Wikipedia article listing number of neurons in the cerebral cortex shows humans as significantly higher than whales, even though raw brain size may look better for whales. Wikipedia also describes an encephalization quotient which takes account of the fact that the brain is used for bodily functions, and on which whales don’t score as highly as they may seem to from brain size.
Yeah, that’s quite interesting. Raises the question though, why do they not have more neurons? They do have larger glia to neuron ratios, it’s not like everything’s simply bigger. Perhaps aquatic environment simply doesn’t reward intelligence that much.
Well, the bodily functions are the same but occurring at a lower rate, for a larger mammal. Most of whale’s body is fat, anyhow, which doesn’t need to be controlled by brain, and it’s not generally the case that people drop many IQ points when they become overweight. Nor are smaller people with same sized heads more intelligent.
edit: on the other hand, EQ may be a (very crude) measure of how well brain tissue pays off for an animal. If you have high quality brain tissue and you’re in a complex environment, at the equilibrium between costs and benefits you would haul around more brain mass per body mass. With the obvious caveat that this tradeoff is very different between land animals, flying animals, and aquatic animals.
Women are in average approximately as intelligent as men (though it depends on how you weigh visual intelligence vs verbal intelligence, and anyway their variance is smaller) even though they have smaller heads.
But is it because of the smaller body sizes using less brain for the bodily functions? I don’t think so.
edit: I frankly don’t get the point with EQ. If we had to make a computer control for bodily functions (e.g. to grow ethical meat), we could do with a weaker cpu for larger animals because they work slower. It just doesn’t make sense that body size would be using up brain to control it, irrespective of the composition of that body.
You greatly underestimate population size nesessary for civilization.
10 people, of course, can’t rebuild the whole civilization, but 10 top scientists and engineers with relevant expertise, given access to the natural resources, can make iron, steel, copper, tooling, build an electric generator, and so on [assuming they don’t get eaten by wildlife early on]. Of course, when they die out, it’s gone with them—the heavily inbred future generations aren’t going to be able to continue that, and probably won’t even survive.
No they cant. For example to make copper you need copper mine workers, smeltery workers, woodcutters, charcoal burners, wagon drivers to transport wood, ore and coal, carpenters to make wagons, builders to build mine and smeltery and farmers to feed them. That is impossible for population less then few thousands at least. Industry nesessary to make a generator requires population in millions.
To make copper, you need copper ore and charcoal and a fire and bellows out of animal hide. Those things weren’t produced in a modern industrial manner until something known as “industrial revolution”. You had a little town, it had a blacksmith, and the blacksmith could smelt his own iron (and copper, if he has the ore, as copper smelting is pretty easy). You’d be surprised how much technology existed entirely locally within a small village.
Actually, to make copper tools all you need is copper nuggets (which aren’t all that rare) and a couple of rocks.
Humans made tools out of meteorite iron before they developed metallurgy.
Heh, yeah. But when you don’t have transportation and it’s just 10 people it may be difficult to find such things without a metal detector… I was just recalling one time I made a little bit of copper from low grade malachite, using a torch. It is really easily reduced from the ore. More easily than iron.
They don’t need to write it down, they just need to store it. A certain amount of knowledge can be “stored” as oral tradition; alternatively, a lot more knowledge can be stored as (say) a pattern of rocks, carefully gathered and moved into position, in an area that can be easily visited.
Some knowledge will almost certainly be lost in the first few generations, despite that.
Oral traditions decay quickly, though. And rock placement is an example of far higher effort per letter. The point is, they find it much harder to retain knowledge. If the rate of loss is greater than the rate of creation, there’s no progress at all.
And even after you’re storing the knowledge, you’re still entirely out of luck on tools. Even if they have waterproof’d encyclopaedia handed to them, they still have this make tools to make tools to make tools cycle that they can’t even bootstrap.
The point is, putting that side to side with humans in some land animal bodies, you have on one hand a bunch of dolphin people who lost pretty much everything in a few generations, save for a few myths that are of no practical use, and on the other hand you have those land people with electricity, radio, and everything, a good chunk of 20th century tech.
Why on earth would they lose everything?
Yes, there would be some significant losses in the first few generations. But if you teleport the top 10 000 scientist and engineers onto an alien world with no human artifacts and leave them in human bodies, there will also be some significant losses in the first few generations. Once data storage technology is able to keep up with the volume of knowledge retained, then the losses will stop, and knowledge will slowly start to be regained.
If they’re sensible, they’ll realise that they can’t retain everything, and put some effort into retaining that which is important.
Why not? Hydraulic cement will harden underwater, and can be carefully pressed and moulded into shape. And while I have no idea how dolphins can get to that point, apparently even underwater welding is possible.
’cause nothing they know is particularly useful for future generations. You just get distorted myths, and it doesn’t take much distortion until technical knowledge becomes entirely non trustworthy and thus worthless.
But can you make hydraulic cement underwater? I was under the impression that you needed fire to make it.
Knowing how to make hydraulic cement isn’t useful?
I am quite certain that the 10 000 top engineers and scientists know quite a few things that would be very useful for future generations. Since I am not in that number, and since I am only one person, I do not know what those things would be, but I estimate a high probability that they exist.
I’m not sure. The Wikipedia article mentions that the ancient Romans used a mixture of volcanic ash and crushed lime, and you certainly do get underwater volcanoes, so the ash should be available… there are probably industrial processes now, but just mixing volcanic ash with the right sort of mud and getting something that hardens if you leave it for a day or two sounds usable underwater to me.
No, the ash would react with water immeadetly and thus be useless and you need burned lime (CaO or (CaOH)2), not limestone (CaCO3)
Ah, thank you. I wasn’t sure about that.
But it’s not enough to convey the formulas, you need also to convey the context. And you need to do so reliably, without later generations adding in nonsense of their own. When the knowledge is in use, it’s naturally checked against reality and protected against decay.
re: cement, my understanding is that you still need to fire components to make hydraulic cement, and underwater ash won’t work.
Which means that they will best remember things that they can immediately put to use, yes. Such as how to breed fish for desired characteristics, maybe? Or how to create some basic tools.
But what those tools may be, besides the tools real dolphins already invented? And breeding fish requires some sort of enclosure, ability to manipulate individual fish, etc. It’s not even clear there’s anything to gain from breeding fish if you don’t do some underwater agriculture for fish food (and thus need fish very different from available species to make full use of that).
Perhaps the reasons dolphin’s large brains are not particularly optimized (comparing to ours) in terms of neural density, despite ample time at their brain volume, is that they already do pretty much everything that a greater intellect would do.
On the ground and with the hands, when our intelligence was the same as of dolphins, we had a lot of complex and useful things we could have been doing if we were a little smarter, and that’s how we evolved our intelligence (and conversely, how they didn’t evolve much further).
Not necessarily. For reasons that are completely intuitive, I imagine our top 10 000 scientist et al. would be able to fashion tools, that could be used very effectively.
You make the assumption (albeit loosely) that progress happens along a straight pre-determined path, where things happen in a specific sequence, much like they did in human history. This is far from so. We are talking about a different planet out here. I’m not suggesting that different laws of physics will be applicable.
But the odds are that the oceanography, will be vastly different, with all sorts of different materials that would be available. There’s no guarantee that this planet (from here on called “Dolphin Alpha”) that steel would even exist or the necessary elements are present on the planet. On the other hand, you could possibly have all manner of other material. Perhaps, under water civilization would have a very different set of social rules.
HEAVY USE OF HYPERBOLE FOLLOWS
Given that these are the most brilliant 10 000 scientists that are present on the planet, I’d expect a sizeable number of them to know morse code, which can then be replicated in dolphin sounds (am no expert, but you’d need only two distinguishable sounds if I’ve got the concept correct). A good number more would be experts in Game theory. The homo sapiens dolphinus (again no expert, but this sounds authentic enough to me! How about we call them HSD for short?) that happen to know both morse code and be well versed in the more salient features of Game Theory, would probably rise to political power within the ranks of the HSD, and since these arent politicians who are in it for material gain (that part comes much later in the advent of a civilisation) and are truly interested in the welfare of the civilisation, would probably find ways to domesticate (or if you prefer the harsher equivalent “enslave”), all sorts of smaller creatures that could work for them!!
For the sake of simplicity, if we assume that marine life on Dolhin Alpha evolved roughly in parallel with that of Earth, the Dolphin Alpha Crabs (resembling the ones that live under water not the other type) and Dolphin Alpha Lobsters could work like minions. The HSD could decipher which fish are poisonous and use that knowledge to hunt larger and more meatier underwater species (I was thinking sharks, but that takes experimentation and I somehow see the world’s leading scientists thinking long and hard and then deciding that there are safer options at hand, except for the few who were also born adrenaline junkies and are now flapping their fins in excitement)
Before I get further carried away, I would just like to say that the body shape is something that can be easily overcome.
Whether intelligence would arise to a greater degree, really is a matter up for debate, but I would b inclined to think the answer is no, until the HSD discovers the equivalent of computing.
I have your ‘domesticate other animals’ listed in a footnote. Would take a long time and getting the domesticated animals to the point where they’re a replacement for your hands… that’s on par with a breeding program to regrow your own hands.
The time during which you can make environment easy enough that your intelligence de-evolves.