Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself

quantamagazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 70 posts

Re: Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself

#31

Post by fhdkweig »

ekelsen wrote: post #7
jdw64 wrote: post #3

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

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"?).

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.

Re: Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself

#32

Post by aozame »

aurareturn wrote: post #22
vitally3643 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, w…

Fire, agriculture, electricity, AI. Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.

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

Re: Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself

#33

Post by vkou »

aurareturn wrote: post #22
vitally3643 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, w…

Fire, agriculture, electricity, AI. Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.

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.

Re: Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself

#34

Post by vitally3643 »

aurareturn wrote: post #22
vitally3643 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, w…

Fire, agriculture, electricity, AI. Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.

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.

Re: Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself

#35

Post by vitally3643 »

vkou wrote: post #33
aurareturn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fire, agriculture, electricity, AI. Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.

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.

Re: Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself

#36

Post by cmrdporcupine »

aurareturn wrote: post #22
vitally3643 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, w…

Fire, agriculture, electricity, AI. Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.

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...)

Re: Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself

#37

Post by cmrdporcupine »

vitally3643 wrote: post #35
vkou wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sign…

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.

Re: Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself

#38

Post by greiskul »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #18
smilespray wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a sample size of one.

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.

Re: Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself

#40

Post by lightedman »

martzy13 wrote: post #24

So the theory explained here is that Hydrogen mixed with the Oxygen in the melted rock (magma) of earth, under extremely high pressure to create our earth specific flavor of H2O (appropriate amount of trace minerals and deuterium). Am I reading that correctly? Link to the paper mentioned in the article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09630-7

Correct, and we can demonstrate this via various gem-bearing and REE-bearing pegmatites which almost universally contain magmatic-sourced water trapped within them.
Post reply on HN