Aquatic Civilisations?

[creature386]

I did not know where to post this, but I think it belongs here:

Do you think it would be possible for some water-living animal to eventually become sapient, like a human (either on Earth after the extinction of humans or on some other planet)? And that without going on land?

Many possible variants of aquatic civilization have been named by xenosociologists. Amphibious littoral civilizations, for instance, may inhabit the seashore. Pelagic civilizations would occupy the water mass and the surface of the sea. Benthic or abyssal civilizations may live in the extreme ocean depths and sea floor of other worlds. Estuarial civilizations may make their homes in bays, fiords and river waters. Limnic cultures could live in lakes.

But are aquatic technical civilizations possible at all? There has been much written on this point, and most writers seem to have reached a negative conclusion. (See Anderson,63 Hoyle,1559 Livesay,2723 MacGowan and Ordway,600 Macvey,49 and Strong.50) But this author believes the majority is wrong.

Consider the requirement of motivation. Many water-dwelling lifeforms on Earth employ technologies (e.g., artifacts) to assist in their survival. One of the most primitive is the archer fish (Toxotes jaculatrix), which carefully aims and spits blobs of water at its prey (insects and spiders) to knock them into the water where they can be caught in the fish’s mouth. Another example, considerably more sophisticated, is the octopus. This intelligent invertebrate gathers stones, chips, and metal scraps to build small cavelike houses in which it resides. Another unusual example is the sea otter (Enhydra lutris). This semiaquatic mammal collects stones and shells from the ocean bottom. Then, while floating on its back at the surface, the otter places these objects on its stomach and uses them as anvils against which to pound and crack open mussels and other hard-shelled molluscs.565 It appears that many sea creatures on this planet are strongly motivated to try their luck at technology. If Earth is typically exotic, water worlds elsewhere in the Galaxy should fare no worse.

What about manipulators? The lack of manipulative organs in the most intelligent seagoing animals -- the cetaceans -- implies that their intelligence "cannot be worked out in technology,"1365,15 unless they have outside help. But this may just be an evolutionary fluke. Elephants seals, a genus of "returned mammals" closely related to the cetaceans, still retain the in credibly delicate, 5-digit "flipper fingers" that their cousins the dolphins must once have possessed. On another world, brains and hands may coincide.*

Of course, there is no reason why boneless tentacles could not serve as technologically useful appendages in the absence of hands and fingers. The cephalopods, which include the octopus, cuttlefish and squid, have from 8-10 limbs surrounding their mouths. These probably evolved from whiskerlike projections near the food cavities of more ancient molluscan forms. The fact that intelligent octopoids do not dominate the seas of Earth may be, again, merely an evolutionary fluke. First, octopuses have hemocyanin blood, which is less efficient than hemoglobin. The animal tires easily and has little appetite for sustained heavy labor. Second, octopuses have ganglionic nervous systems which may have limited their sentience on Earth. But there is nothing fundamentally wrong with a tentacular intelligence. The convergence with certain well-known land forms (prehensile-tailed monkeys, elephants) strongly suggests that tentacles may build technologies on other worlds.

How about physical resources? Clays and mud are available for ceramics and pottery, sand for glass, and there is a tremendous variety of organic materials available for chemical industry -- dyes, acids, drugs, etc. Stone masonry is quite possible, since concrete can be mixed that can set underwater. Nodules littering the continental shelves and ocean floors could be harvested for their nickel, cobalt and manganese. Fantastic quantities of metals are afloat in seawater itself. For example, a kilogram of iron can be harvested by filtering 50,000 m3 of ordinary seawater past a simple magnetic lodestone. (The liquid volume involved is only about as much as a single shark breathes in a month.) Marine lifeforms could devise an advanced biological technology including "cold light" streetlamps using luminiferous bacteria, architectural coral, and "slave fishes."

Where do we get the energy to work all these resources? Aquatic ETs may discover superheated underwater volcanoes -- these exist in great numbers on Earth’s ocean floors and should be even more numerous on larger, more massive pelagic worlds. Submarine oil deposits may be found in sedimentary strata. Natural gas and other combustible vapors upwelling from the planetary interior could be trapped in special containers and burned using oxygen imported from the surface. Lacking combustion, bubblewheels could be erected over regions of submarine helium gas effluence and the rotary power used to turn mechanical flywheels.

There is no bar to the full development of electrical power generation. Electric eels could be domesticated for this purpose, or simply cannibalized for their organic batteries. Alternatively, marine extraterrestrials could build their own batteries using pieces of carbon, tankards of seawater and some other electrolyte, and a small bit of metal. The electricity thus obtained might then be used to perform electrolysis on water, splitting each molecule into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms. This gaseous mixture is a potent fuel, and could conceivably be used to power smelters, streetlights, seacars and seabuses, 2800 °C oxyhydrogen blowtorches, turbines and jet-propelled devices, and even rockets.

There is little that man has accomplished technologically on land that could not be repeated in some analogous fashion by a race of marine lifeforms on a pelagic world elsewhere in our Galaxy.

www.xenology.info/Xeno/20.3.2.htm

Personally, I don't find the article very convincing. The author too often says, "Well, it's just an evolutionary fluke" and the his solution to the lack of combustion…
…well, it is too complicated.
Any civilisation would advance through trial and error and the postulated sources of energy are too complex for any civilisation in the pre-fire stage to figure out. But the other arguments are convincing. It is much more plausible than I have initially thought.

[Infinity Blade]

So overall, do you think aquatic civilizations are at all likely? You apparently find the idea much more plausible than before, but you weren't convinced by the article which argues for it.

[creature386]

Not likely, but not impossible (if we have enough "flukes"). I can very well imagine that they could exit, but 9 out of 10 times a civilisation develops, I'd expect a terrestrial one.

[Life]

This seems to be related:

Abstract

Between the ninth and third millennia B.C. wetter conditions prevailed over most of Africa. Lakes and rivers were fuller and some of the internal basins were temporarily linked, especially in the ‘Middle African’ belt. This comprises the southern Sahara and Sahel, stretching from the Upper Niger to the Middle Nile, with a south-easterly extension into the Upper Nile basin and the East African rift valleys. This situation was exploited by people who developed a decidedly aquatic economy and culture. From their waterside camps and settlements archaeologists have recovered bones of fish and aquatic animals which these people ate, as well as the distinctive harpoon-heads carved from bone with which they obtained them, and also pottery, bearing peculiar decoration executed with fish-bones and water-shells, made in imitation of (fishing-) baskets. Boating and other cultural developments are deducible. The harpoons date back to 7,000 b.c. at least; the pottery dates back to more than 6,000 b.c. and was clearly an African invention. It reflects important developments in gastronomy and home life.

In the Kenya rift valley the main stage of Leakey's ‘Kenya Capsian’ culture is essentially the local manifestation of this far-flung ‘aquatic civilization’.

Its greatest extent was achieved during the wettest times of the seventh millennium b.c., and probably involved the expansion of Negroid peoples across this continent-wide savanna belt. Also explained perhaps is the extensive, though now fragmented, distribution of languages which Greenberg combines in his ‘Nilo-Saharan’ super-family. It is suspected that aspects of this ancient aquatic way of life may be maintained or reflected by latter-day isolated or ‘unclean’ lake or swamp communities. This subject has been largely neglected by African culture-historians.

Drier conditions in the late sixth and fifth millennia b.c. signalled a decline of this aquatic civilization and, in particular, broke its geographical continuity. Nevertheless, there was a qualified revival in many parts in the fourth and third millennia. In the Kenya rift this later phase seems to equate with the first stage of the ‘stone bowl cultures’. Around Lake Victoria a devolved relic survived until the eve of Bantu expansion about two thousand years ago. Other late or modified examples are known on the Nile and in the western Sudan. Generally, however, the viability and prestige of an aquatic way of life were undermined by the second millennium b.c. In the Sahara and Sahel as well as in the northerly parts of eastern Africa this decline was paralleled by the spread of pastoralism as a new basis of subsistence and prestige. Those who introduced cattle to Kenya from Ethiopia were Cushitic-speakers maintaining, significantly, a fish-taboo.

This subject should prove of considerable historiographical interest. The aquatic way of life flourished through Middle Africa at the very time when grain-agriculture and stock-raising were being pioneered in the Near East; and the slow spread of agriculture in Africa, sometimes considered an indication of ‘backwardness’, may be partly explicable by the very success of the aquatic life and of its distinct cultural tradition which was ascendant for a while across the widest part of the continent.

Source: www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-african-history/article/aquatic-civilization-of-middle-africa/EAD524E69B2979001AF8C307E3B2448B#

[creature386]

It is not really related except for the terminology. The thread is about exclusively aquatic organisms, not terrestrial ones who happen to use the water for their own purposes.

Interesting read though.