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

quantamagazine.org

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

#21

Post by mapt »

Calavar wrote: post #20
onlypassingthru wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#22

Post by aurareturn »

vitally3643 wrote: post #5
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

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.

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

#23

Post by ekelsen »

sarkhan wrote: post #11
ekelsen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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

#24

Post by martzy13 »

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

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

#25

Post by opticfluorine »

burkaman wrote: post #15
oneneptune wrote: post #4

Wow what an awesome art piece by Ada Zejun Shen that they commissioned(?) for this article!

Their portfolio is beautiful https://adazshen.com/

Wow, what a portfolio! This one in particular caught my eye: https://adazshen.com/Viral-Placenta

I have little artistic ability myself, but I am continuously in awe of what artists create. It makes me hope for the optimistic outlook of AI where UBI frees people to pursue creative and intellectual pursuits, rather than constantly trying to push a stock price uphill.

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

#28

Post by layer8 »

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

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.

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

#29

Post by anonymousiam »

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.

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

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

#30

Post by onlypassingthru »

Calavar wrote: post #20
onlypassingthru wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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-...

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