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Comment by jdw64 | Hacker News Reader

Life began in the Ocean, but why did civilization begin on land? Is it because of fire? But I wonder if a different kind of civilization could have emerged

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That's one theory, yes. Cooking food (with fire) makes more calories available, meaning less hunting required to support more individuals, and/or freeing up more time and calories for thinking. This allowed us to evolve bigger and more complex brains.

While it's not a given that fire is a hard prerequisite for an industrial civilization, it certainly accelerated our technological development. Fact of the matter is, we know of exactly one civilization, which is not enough to draw any conclusions. There's no real reason we know of that aquatic species cannot evolve into a technological civilization, we just haven't seen it happen. Fact is we don't really know how an intelligent technological species evolves. We only have guesses from our own history.

And a sample size of one.

That's what I said, yes.

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

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

It is possible it is just time. Modern humans are considered to have existed for 300k~ years. Civilizations are about 6k years old.

So who knows. Maybe if you gave them an extra 10k years, they would have achived "civilization". It is not much for the scale of human existance. But it is longer than any of our civilizations has existed for.

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

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

And makes sense with agriculture and civilization coming together. Agriculture improved the carrying capacity of an acre of land dramatically from what it was from foraging and hunting.

Written language ?

Got it too easy ?

It doesn’t have to be writing. At least one culture used ropes and knots.

I think that (Incas) was more numerical record keeping rather than written language.

What's special about written language (which some existing hunter-gatherer tribes still don't have), as opposed to spoken language, is that it allows cultural knowledge to be spread, stored, accumulated, and built upon.

Fire, agriculture, electricity, AI.

Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.

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

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

Check back in 5 years. This is going to age poorly.

The reason is that, despite what many think, AI actually is able to create novel ideas and solutions. That's why AlphaGo was so important; it couldn't beat the world's best Go player just be being a fancy autocomplete and a big processor. It had to create new discoveries and then use them effectively. That was the turning point. It's been a decade of improvements since then, and AI is already making discoveries we couldn't have made without it. The impacts are already here and in your world, you just haven't recognized them as such yet. But in a few years it will be undeniable to even the most uneducated observer, since changes that could not be possible will be present in every person's life as the effects ripple out across basically every industry.

In no timeline nor carbon-based universe does GP's comment age poorly.

I am a bit skeptical but cautiously optimistic about AI “creating novel ideas”, if we are using “create” pedantically. Any interesting examples?

Those math proofs from a few weeks back seem plausible.

Nuclear weapons and the control structure around their use and fossil fuels and the C-corporation and what it optimizes for will probably turn out to be more important to the long-term future of humanity and it's civilization.

Fossil fuels are another feature like fire. One of the leading theories is that the availability of extremely energy dense fuels is one of the primary reason we were able to industrialize, and that without those fuels industrialization would be vastly more difficult if not impossible.

Personally I disagree with 'impossible', but it would definitely be harder. There's a pretty good argument to be made for leaving significant quantities of fossil fuels in the ground for the next civilization. If we wipe ourselves out, whoever comes next is going to very badly need those fuels to rebuild an industrial base.

There were copper & bronze age industrial sites. Esp Tin & arsenic bronze smelting sites. Complete with child labour, open pit mines, assembly line style processing, and heavy metal poisoning. E.g. Semiyarka, in present day Kazakhstan, ~1600 BCE. You can still see the environmental damage to this day from the air.

Romans had industrial processes, too, for things like fabric / laundry cleaning.

What's new in the 18th/19th century is full-on mechanization of industry. And the wage labour system to make it possible. Accompanied by acts of enclosure etc to drive the peasantry off the land and into factories. Also the mechanization of agriculture that went with that.

That's the fun thing, since we have only observed a single advanced civilization, and that one only indirectly through archaeological evidence, there's no hard facts to be had! We can only make guesses. We don't know what is and is not required to make an advanced technological species, and we won't have any answers until we meet another one to compare with.

Arguably they're all fire -- requiring/involving forms of combustion.

(Well, debatable about agriculture, slash'n'burn wasn't the only form of it, but it was common for land clearing at least... all we have now is one that involves combustion engines, though...)

AI hasn’t taken its final form yet.

Brains are resource hungry, especially oxygen hungry. Earth's air is orders of magnitude richer in oxygen molecules than its water. This likely made it easier for intelligence to develop on land. It's worth noting that the smartest aquatic animals are air breathing mammals that spent much of their evolutionary history on land before returning to water.

When did octopuses start breathing air?

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

Both whales and prairie dogs turn out to have rather advanced degrees of verbal language capability, more complex than any of the Great Apes bar homo sapiens. Crows somehow culturally remember the face of an antagonist multiple generations later. Almost every highly social vertebrate has degrees of intelligence that would get you burned as a witch if you'd suggested it not too long ago, in the era when "Fishes clearly don't feel pain" was just a cultural default assumption.

I've heard that the biggest limiting factor in octopus ocean domination is their short lifespans. Tool use, building structures, communication, facial recognition, multiple brains, it's all there.

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/octopuses-keep-surprising-us-...

Female octopi also die reproducing. Knowledge cannot be passed from one generation to the next. Everything they know is either instinctual or learned.

Interesting to think what could be if cephalopods raised their young instead of leaving them to completely fend for themselves. It would start intergenerational knowledge transfer, i.e. culture. Maybe selection pressure then trends towards group cooperation instead of going it solo.

I still think there would be huge barriers to "civilization" as I think you mean? (Do any of the apes have "civilization"?).

Orcas do this already.

I mean there might be a already a civilization that is in the building that will peak 100k years later, and we just don't know about it.

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

The real problem with cephalopods is their lifespan. For their age, they are almost as smart as humans, the problem is that they don't live past the age of 5 years.

I would argue that not having any overlap between generations is a bigger problem. It guarantees no accumulation of knowledge.

Agreed. If they were social enough to form large communities of unrelated families, it would also fix the generation overlap. But they don't do that either. They seem to be in a weird evolutionary dead end for intelligence.

Physically manipulating objects is a lot harder underwater, even if you somehow evolve fine motor control despite not having any real use for it. So that severely limits what an intelligent aquatic species could actually do with that intelligence. Aside from fire you're missing the wheel, a writing system and many other things.

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

Humans are one of a handful species equipped to change their immediate environment to suit their needs, across virtually every environment, and introduce stability.

Beyond that…

Being able to have down time seems like a prerequisite to creating. civilization.

Also, having both the intelligence and desire to seem and recognize ways to improve—even if not strictly necessary—via tools to free up even more time also seems to be a requirement.

And having a system to reliably and in-scale transmit this knowledge is the final ingredient.

So some baseline stability, down-time, intelligence, reliable knowledge transmission, tool-use for the above, and active willingness to improve all of the above all seem like necessary ingredients.

> but why did civilization begin on land?

Octopus have civilization, despite the usual solo trip, group behavior has been observed, small neighborhoods of octopi staying within their shells and occasionally pestering each other.

Some aquatic mammals have civilization as well.

A lot of what's going on just hasn't been observed well

1) Land has more diverse and rapidly changing environments, creating generalists, creating advanced intelligence

2) Civilization requires hands, but in water fins and flippers are more useful

3) Sure, it could have worked out differently, but here we are

You're talking about a thing that happened for 1 species for such a small period of Earth's history to be just a blip. There's not enough data to draw a conclusion here.

One hypothesis is that the brain began too look (and eventually plan) farther ahead with land animals, because you have a much farther view in air than in water. On land there is more evolutionary pressure to change one’s behavior regarding animals farther away that you see and that can see you, to predict their behavior and plan one’s own behavior within a larger time horizon.

Can’t answer that, nobody will likely to be able to ever, outside religions. We are NBKs. How that happened, idk, some cosmic curse. Dolphins didn’t develop atlatals, broad heads, catapults, napalm, and F35s.

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