Great observation! Why bother lifting something that dense out of a gravity well when the vast majority of it is just... floating out there. Same with every other raw resource. As much fun as it is in sci-fi, space wars would be essentially pointless and useless; because there's so much base material to pick up at your leisure, but getting your hi-end machinery blown up would be a huge loss. For that matter, who would want to rule a planet anyway? Pain in the butt proposition that wouldn't get you anything you couldn't get a lot easier by just making or refurbishing a habitat and recruiting some friends who like the same lifestyle, and assemble some servo-bots. It may well be decadence rather than enlightenment that makes for peace in the galaxy :)
@@animistchannel2983 Why would anybody want to be king of a country? Pain in the butt having to run the place and guard against the others who want to be king and will be willing to kill you for it.
@@animistchannel2983 I imagine if there were space wars it would be in dyson swarms after some Kessler syndrome event destroyed the previous civilization and all the resources left were bound up in empty dead space habitats, which quickly run out. Then you could have a resource war with quadrillions of casualties I doubt that would happen in real life, but it feels a lot more plausible to me, especially since the residents of the dyson swarm might have diverged so much from each other it’s actually a war between different species
@@animistchannel2983Thrill of the hunt my guy. Think of it like a game, if you have cheats the whole thing gets boring real quick so you might sometime turn them off for a challenge and in this case it's sl@ughtering some hairless apes
I'm starting to realize that I don't even have to be interested in the topic of the video title, I just know I'm going to learn awesome stuff no matter what
Giant alien spider monsters roaming the universe that have children smarter than Einstein. Welp I understand the Fermi paradox now, everyone came to this conclusion and went into hiding.
Hey arachnids generally are harmless even beneficial though ticks do unfortunately exist which is horrifying Fun fact did you know that arachnids unlike most arthropods actually do have a endoskeleton?(Made of cartilage like early vertebrate skeletons ) Interestingly the clade arachnids are part of the chelicerates also turn out to have high energy UV fluorescence both in extant species and in fossils. (I guess this explains why ticks are so damned hard to kill) As such space lasers probably wouldn't work very well against them as they are naturally radiation hardened. (In fact based on more recent research they might actually have evolved to live on land prior to the formation of the Ozone layer and recolonized the seas in the Ordovician. Thankfully arachnids never evolved an efficient respiratory system and thus are limited by their ability to uptake oxygen. Also did you know spiders have evolved electromagnetic gliding using the Earth's electric fields to propagate across continents and even oceans. And mites are everywhere including on all of us so if arachnid like organisms are common there will be no place to hide. Though writing this raises a horrifying idea what if mites evolved an intelligent civilization in which case their planet would be... us. Now *that* would be terrifying
@@Dragrath1 i did not know bout that endo skeleton ish damn spiders are so cool. imma never understand that hate towards them. especially since Portia exists. just the bomb digs
@@amcmr2003 I think we need to decouple "intelligence" from "technological intelligence". Just because it doesn't use technology, doesn't mean it isn't "intelligent" in some way. And if lack of technology makes it OK to pick on a group by a higher-tech group, then nothing wrong was done to stone-age tribes by higher-tech humans. :P
@@boblazer9220 Some 80 some people did. I'm happy for that. @LaikaLycanthrope For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much-the wheel, New York, wars and so on-whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man-for precisely the same reasons.
think there were also species like that in much older games that would be meh today, starflight I think was one from 1986. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight I've thought about attempting to make a 3D model of the ship on the cover art a few times, then decided it wasn't worth the effort, lol.
@@mpetersen6 Do you mean: Would they be aware of the influence by their medium? Or do you mean: Would they consider themselves normal and dry would be the odd state, mirrored to our view?
My first novel A Darkling Sea was set on a Europa-like moon in another star system, and I had lots of fun coming up with technology for the anaerobic, echolocating, lobster-like intelligent beings living in an ocean under the ice. They could do stonework (though they tended to grind rather than chip it), made extensive use of knitting and weaving with plant fibers, and could carve animal bones and shells. Their civilization was based on controlling the flow of hot nutrient-rich water from seafloor vents, in order to maximize the biological output. In the book I tried to imply they had an extremely old civilization: the human explorers gradually realize that the entire surface of the seabottom, even the "wilderness" areas far from any active vents, have been reshaped by the intelligent inhabitants. It's out of print now but still available as an ebook. When I saw this video topic I was very interested in seeing what Isaac's take on those issues would be.
Its kinda unsettling to think about that even the earths oceans (as well as the antarctic) could be ripe for aquatic species colonization (A Movie was made about that called The Abyss I think) And there are much more aquatic worlds compared to terrestrial ones (Europa Ganymede etc)
As usual very excellent content. I remember you did one show called “Crazy Aliens.” I wonder if you could do one on ‘Alien Trolls?” A species that likes causing mayhem for entertainment.
a race of GrayStillPlays, "alright, the only game that lets you divide the earth by zero, PlayGame Damnit!" lol. Oumuamua missed and it was only moving at 26km/s, "those are rookie numbers!" add all the zeros, how fast, yes, lol. would it be trolls, or just "sarcastic aliens", hmmm, that may depend on the perspective, as that could easily end up with all calling the others oppressive dictators, and we need not even look at space-aged civilization for that, just look at earthlings that can't even get off their own rock let alone get out of there solar system despite broadcasting threats of war and tyranny against all life in the universe on an intermittent base, lol. I can only hope they do not know of the earth at all, or see it as jokes of an outrageous sarcastic nature, lol.
that wouldn't seem to be a trait a majority or even significant percentage of any civ would have since evolution tends not to favor sociopaths. even if it did it runs into the prob that an exociv would tend to limit the actions of its more annoying members if only to avoid an interstellar incident. good to remember that trolls are a severe minority, a really loud and annoying minority, but a minority nonetheless.
@@virutech32 yeah, agreed, it's far more likely to run across genuine sarcastic funny aliens than sociopaths. especially if they ever had to debug software or diagnose anything on a ship. I have no clue what this program is doing or what the input variables are, however I find that if I devide 'U' and 'V' by 1.4 the star charts look about right on the navigation display, lol. "Alright, the only game that doesn't know the meaning of limits, Play Game Damnit!" lol. how much horsepower do you need for orbital maneuvers, I don't know, math is hard, adding nines is easy, all the horsepower, lol.
Not likely practical. If you could survive such close proximity to a vent to attempt this, you probably can't survive conditions away from it. And a moving forge is hard to use.
@@KRYMauL structures isn't the same thing as working metal. That takes a serious amount of heat energy. Nearly impossible amounts even on earth, for early civilization. And we have oxygen and wood. A water world....no realistic chance.
@@icecold9511 I see your point, but could an electric fish develop enough power to heat up a rock and create metals. Alternatively the species could make relatively advanced technology based on chitin and bioluminescent.
That’s a great game. I wish it’d tell me less about what I was looking at, drawing your own conclusions and making your own notes is possibly the best part of its setting. (I really liked the game I was seeing in early access, I played it before we had the codex and after it officially declared itself complete.)
This episode made me ponder this: Is there a SF story that features electroreceptive aliens who find the electromagnetic fields generated by, say, radio communication unpleasant, and consider human-populated worlds to be unbearably cacophonous? Would you use a smartphone if it sounded like a dental drill when in operation?
Yes a series by Timothy Zahn were an encounter goes wrong when Earth ships use radar to locate Alien ships that are sensitive to radio and thus think they are under attack, sorry but i cannot remember what it was called.
John Scalzi kicks off one of his books (The Android's Dream iirc) with a politician sabotaging trade deals by aggravating an alien of a species sensitive to certain smells by using (wait for it)... modified farts. And then the story begins. I know, i know. It's not QUITE the same thing. But i thought it was worth mentioning :D
That'd be highly, highly, unlikely. There are a myriad bodies in the universe that give off more radiation than our transmissions, and they'd be more likely to be bothered by their own sun, than us.
@@evertonpennant112 Intensity is a function of both source strength and distance. Just because they're not strong from half a galaxy away doesn't mean they'd want to physically visit our planet, or let us build an embassy in their cities, or whatever.
I feel like we are legit one of the first space visiting races out there. How awesome would it be if WE were the ones to explore the universe uplifting all the dolphin and squid people as we go😂 I doubt the spider people will need any help from us.
I've always thought that was the case. Through us consciousness will spread everywhere and conquer the universe. and here we are thinking there's nothing special about us.
In the '80s cartoon Galaxy Rangers, uplifted dolphins were used in one episode. The dolphins were receiving a telepathic distress call from an intelligent aquatic race akin to the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Near the end, the dolphins pretended to the aliens that humans are the dolphins' trained pets.
considering how many, just want to be left alone to enjoy their lives without having others impose their ways on them, they probably spend their time focusing on their lives and seldom think of doing to others what they don't want done to them (being oppressed by an overlord). it's an iffy proposition to assume corruption and/or greed would never set in with the uplifters that may never get past looking down on or thinking "less of" the uplifted races (you were incapable of doing it on your own, we had to do it for you, like attitudes). Need we forget from 3000bc to around 300ad, Egyptians never wanted a 'better' afterlife, they only wanted a continuation of the life they had and loved in this world, I don't think they would be particularly happy if the life they had and loved was upended so they could never go back to it again. it's also a bit counterintuitive akin to bulldozing over a place like the grand canyon and slapping massive skyscrapers in its place, because you appreciate the way the location naturally looked, lol. uplifting brings a huge mountain of social political and ethical baggage with it. that may very well be one of many reasons no alien has shown up at eath saying "here is how to make a galactic-G-15000 modem and how to create a Milkyway-wiki and space-book account", lol. not to say, humans may be like ants on a nature reserve that was never allocated for the animals that happened to evolve on that rock in the middle of the park. they ultimately may not know humans exsist, or care at all about earth life. At least 'if' humans get there, they can have the solace of achieving it themselves rather than being spoonfed the information and tech like an incapable infant.
We'd come off as the most impressively lonely species. Consider the act of serially uplifting alien species within the context of the Voyager probes and SETI; essentially, we've already sent nudes and a mixtape into the void, and have been staring at our proverbial screen ever since. This would be the equivalent of us going "If I can't find anyone to respond, than I'll create them!"
there's all kinds of technology that's not dependent on fire, and there's always lava if they really need it. what about developing chemistry near geothermal vents? what about sculpting coral analogs instead of metallurgy? what about developing air travel concepts by seeing bubbles? what about biopolymer-producing plants and microorganisms, or filter farming trace resources directly from the water? people underestimate the true wealth of the ocean
I like the filter farming idea! Tiny pieces of metal would melt easier and quicker as well I’m curious as to how they would develop the concept and then separate useful particles from the useless ones? 🤔
I wouldn't call it a lack of imagination so much as a lack of evidence of it happening. I believe he did say in the video that it is entirely possible, and that for a species so different from our own, the order of technilogical development is not required to be the same in order to reach a similar outcome of solar system colonization.
@@88HELLJUMPER88 Maybe I should rephrase my comment. Before it sounded like I was accusing Isaac of a lack of imagination. And yes, we lack evidence of it ever happening. But a lack of evidence is not evidence against it.
@@captainstroon1555 i absolutely agree. Correlation is not causation. Im sure there are thousands of inconcievable ways life could start the road to intelligence. But attempting to guess how it could otherwise happen is a bit superflous at this point i think.
Oxygen combustion fire may not be strictly necessary for conventional tech progression. Underwater, you could still have chemical reactions that produce the necessary heat for discovering metalworking, and driving machines. I'm no chemist, so I have no idea how likely or easy it would be, but it seems far from impossible.
So... space penguins? Some kind of alien living on a world with a subsurface ocean that somehow breached the ice and dives back in for food? That stuff sounds AWESOME.
I think this breaks the premise. If they returned for AIR (as in oxygen) because they can only breath underwater then yes, this could evolve into a fire yelding civ.
Imagine sentient aliens living beneath a frozen crust, on a planet with no atmosphere, but they've reached a level of technology similar to what ancient China had when that one guy made a rocket throne, and they're trying to drill through their crust, not knowing they will cause a cataclysmic event. Meanwhile, members of a xeno-anthropology team from earth are trying to find a way to send a waring to these aliens without breaking the ice themselves.
I'm wondering if ocean planet creatures might develop flight if there is no land. I can see the structures in water being very similar to what is required for underwater so the possibility of going straight to flight is possible, especially the thicker the atmosphere is, or the lighter the gravity. Maybe? Animals that develop traits to get out of the ocean (living on the ice, eating in the water) would have a major advantage, as did our first land dwelling creatures.
The under ice air pocket/tunnel is one possibility that I never encountered before. But now that I did, I wonder what could be the possibilities for one's characteristics. I wouldn't assume, that the walls of such air chambers would need to be made out of ice, once evolution had a field day with them. There could be several types of alien ecosystems, that could transform such environments to something complete different from what we would envision when thinking about them: coral like aliens, that deposit silica, and other minerals to the walls, turning it into a more traditional cavern, or coral reef, living mats that grow fur, to keep the heat from their body from escaping, or animals that insulate their tunnels from wetness and cold by coating it with webbing, not to mention just plain old overgrowth from chemoautotrophic flora, feeding on chemicals raising from volcanic activity down below. I never thought that the possibilities of life trapped under the ice could have such interesting pathways to alien environments. Really, life's ability to transform it's environment rarely brought up when discussing the chances of life developing in water worlds. Like, the possibility of life creating floating environments: Take some photosynthetic life form, from microorganisms to shallow water plant analogs, that compete for light. Learning to float on the surface would be a clear advantage for such a creature, and all it would take for it to learn is to keep bubbles inside it. If it develops large colonies, and ecosystems surrounding it, the development of large swimming islands made out of life. With enough buoyancy, and the competition for light continuing, there could be even grass and trees, and whole jungles, with fauna to match, without there ever being land on the surface. Oceanic worlds are underestimated and underappreciated.
One of my favorite episodes for sure! Made me think of that movie Arrival, even though those aliens weren't water-based. Why nobody has thought of making a movie about this type of life? Would be truly interesting, and properly alien
Imagine Space Spiders setting up a web of probes offering promise of first contact and knowledge sharing only to be waiting in suspended animation for their victims to show up at the center of their probe web.
Lol web of probes is appropriate for spider people Be funnier if they looked nothing like spiders 😂 Why do we call them spider people they look like skinny walruses? it’s not them it’s the probes! 😂 the sleeping skinny walruses!
I usually just listen to your videos in the background, and I'm not sure what I thought you looked like, but seeing your face in the tail end of the video was so unnerving! Keep up the good work, Isaac!
This is such an awesome topic. I love to study Marine Biology and it's my major in college. It's amazing to think that there are most probably entire oceanic ecosystems on other worlds for us to hopefully explore one day!
When you talked about oceans worlds with a shallow depth I was like, "hey, that's how you can have "land" animals. The seafloor would be like the ground on a terrestrial landmass, full of smaller plants down below with bigger ones which would rise up in search of the sunlight. You might see giant forests spring up, rising from the ocean floor, looking like bald cypress trees. Then you'd have animals evolve to be able to climb out of the water to feed on these plants. Then boom, "land" based life, but it is more like an ecosystem of a jungle canopy without the forest floor.
What about flying fish? In a thicker atmosphere they could glide farther, and perhaps eventually become fully amphibious. That could open up further options for life on such planets.
I see Dorado hunting flying fish at sea, they work together with birds, who catch them when they fly. So that niche would be available on a planet with no birds. So the alien equivalent of Dorado might eventually evolve true flight. The flying fish also might evolve to live out of water, but that would just provide a new niche for their hunters too.
Is there any way you might consider an episode on unconscious aliens, similar to those found in Peter Watts’ Blindsight? Just finished it myself and it was a crazy interesting concept and I’m curious what you think. Love the video and been a long time subscriber to the channel. Keep up the great work, Mr. Arthur!
You can get the same quality of earphone at 5 times less the cost of Raycons. They’re seriously not very high quality. But hey, if this show needs funding, I’m all for it. Whatever gets us more Isaac Arthur!
Life in the ocean world may not have to follow life in our seas and oceans. There is a rather universal caveat though. Life in our deep ocean trenches has limitations set by both coldness and pressures that slow biological processes. Indeed at extreme depth basic cellular life processes become extremely difficult. Because of that shallow water life would seem most likely to evolve into more complex forms. In a deep ocean world you entire resource base would be water. Hard to build a tech society with only water. You would need at leas a significant amount of shallow ocean areas to broaden your resource base. Whales and dolphins are land based animals that returned to the sea so they are out of the equation also. An entirely different and alien biology is needed, but that’s what this program is about. Nautilus in space ?
Hi, Isaaaac. I'm a huge fan of your videos and have found them to be of unprecedented quality. For that, Thank You. I wanted to tell you about some stuff I've been working on, if that's ok with you. By sheer chance, I was just writing a hard-sci-fi short story about a race of intelligent aliens similar to cephalopods and their technological history in the sea of their world recently - and my friend recommended me this video! I've been having a lot of fun imagining how they might have developed technology without fire and agree with some of your ideas about how it might come about, for example the best tools to begin with would likely be other organisms, their bones, organs, and fibers. I call the species Artifex Rétes Sapiens (thinking net makers), or just The Rétes, because weaving is as central to their technology as fire is to ours. They have an octopoid intelligence rather different from ours and weave kelp forests into large dwellings and enclosures for the handful of animal species they've managed to domesticate, using an instinctual habit of twisting and twining that they've slowly learned to refine and perfect. They use air sacks of both plants and animals to float clay to the surface to harden and scratch to make records, especially of weaving patterns. They developed mathematical theories of topology and knotwork before even developing a proper base system for counting and have an excellent intuitive grasp of 3D kinematics, especially for non-rigid bodies, since their tentacles, which embody much of their intelligence, are so similar to the fibers they work with. I imagined that they would, much as you suggest, use the concentrated heat from hydrothermal vents, in this case to reshape organisms similar to glass sponges into fiberglass-like strands, which give them access to much higher tensile strength materials as well as giving them the ability to plastically deform rigid bodies that can then be solidified into tools, traps, weapons for use against themselves (naturally their biggest competition), etc. It's been interesting to try and come up with scientifically valid and practically realistic ways that such a species' civilization might develop. For example, could they develop sails that float above the water for long-distance travel? I very much like the idea of ships which the occupants pilot from Under the water! I concluded that it was theoretically possible, but very very difficult, for such a species to develop high technology similar to ours, and that it might be more likely for them to pursue branches of technology more suited to their environment and particular kind of embodied intelligence. I'd love to hear more from you about possible ways that technology in general could develop in ways different from how it's developed here on Earth. Thank you so much for your time (and your excellent videos) and I wish you the best of luck in the future!
Developing rocketry on a water world? You'd need a Robert Cod-dard or a Werner Von Brown trout. I accept the chorus of pained groans at the awful puns.😉
Have you considered doing an episode on non-animalistic sapiens such as sapient Oceans or planets? You seem to have covered most other Sci Fi tropes, and there are several examples of these. Check out the excellent Civ game, Alpha Centauri which featured a very interesting, and on the surface, well thought out idea for a sapient planet.
Thinking about alien environments I thought of what will happen to future earth if the sun doesn't vaporise it first. Eventually the cooling molten core will go solid and we, or whoever, will lose our electromagnetic shield and, perhaps more importantly, stop having plate tectonics. The remaining mountains would wear down and fill the deeper oceanic trenches. The water level would therefore rise, leaving little dry land. So when we find water-worlds we may find aquatic alien species that developed on land and eventually was forced into the water. So it may well have technologies discovered on land, and space flight and even might be amphibious. Space traversing frogs.
Great episode, especially crammed into a 26-minute time frame. Every time I thought, "but what about...?" ...and then you covered that next; or it was such a big can of worms, it couldn't possibly be done justice in a quick survey of possibilities like this. I really only have a couple addenda where oceanic creatures would actually have an advantage in science/engineering thinking over land animals. Rocketry. It might be harder to build the technology, but Newton's laws are actually more evident in a liquid environment. The squid people and whale-types would understand jet propulsion before they ever banged the first rocks together, and it would be inherent in their sense of travel. They would also automatically get the notion that what drifts, keeps drifting. Ideal gas laws and displacement, and the notion of mass vs weight. These principles took humans a long time to sort out, but oceanic creatures would be faced with obvious examples all the time. Multidimensional thinking. An undersea environment with currents having to be taken into account provides more dimensions to manipulate to start with, and immediate use of multi-vector thinking. Orbital mechanics and so on would be practically built into their intuition. So even taking into account that metallurgy would be a pain to get going, some of the crucial ways of thinking to become of spacefaring civilization and comfortable among the "sea of stars" would actually come more naturally to creatures that started out in a sea to start with. In particular, give an ocean world just a few pips of mineral-rich volcanic mountains sticking up into the atmosphere, and they could very well have the evolutionary advantage. In a way, that's exactly the aspect of earth that made the concept and usefulness of "ships" the crucial idea in the first place.
I wish i knew you had a code a few weeks ago, I just bought a pair of the work models & I love them. More comfortable than any other earbud I've used & you are indeed correct about the battery. Pairing is mildly annoying if you want to pair with other phones, I have to reset the things to do so, which means my phone looses its connection & has to be paired back up. Found that out when I lent them to my coworker to try.
I really can't appreciate you enough, these lectures are truly amazing. I'm lucky to be in an age where I have access to such knowledge, thank you so much!
im pretty sure its impossible for their to be no interface between water and vacuum. there must be some atmosphere, and if not there would probably be a gradual change from liquid to gas as it slowly thinned into the vacuum of space.
@@gogoida1280 yeah so what i said was just like how for humans, space starts beyond our atmosphere, for them space will also start beyond their atmosphere. it cant just be the waters surface and then boom we're in space, that wont work because waters a fluid. either the surface will be a solid layer of ice or it will have an atmosphere
If he was he wouldn't be able to help himself and he would just admit it for the sake of getting good information out there. His desire to spread a wealth of knowledge would be his own downfall and I think he would be okay with that
i just realised when he said african catfish, that he's referring to barbel also called vundu, also very slipperu fish as it will try and escape back to the water if you dont secure your cooler box for taking it home, they can breathe air but not for long, ive lost some fish that escaped but couldn't quite make it back to the water.
8:59 By the way this reminds me of an extremly intelligent alien specie from an oceanic world of shallow reefs wich spent its time observing the stars without technology, in the comic book serie Valerian and Laureline...
Harry Harrison wrote the West of Eden trilogy. The Yilane developed a technological civilization without fire. Although they begin in the ocean, most time is spent on land.
Alien super-spiders and squids is literally what the book Children of Ruin is all about. Highly recomended, although you might want to read the first book first.
i think the concept "where fire doesn't exist" is a bit wrong because you still ahve things like thermal vents that can get quite hot or even themn you got decaying radioactive metals that can achieve the same temperature
yeah but ore hot enough to be reduced is generally also hot enough to react with the water around it. heat isnt the only thing you need to smelt stuff. not to mention that heat travels more through water so ur gettin awful close to some scorching hot water wich is prolly gunna kill long before you get any of it smelted even if you could. on top of that the area around thermal vents is often also rich in pretty toxic/corrosive solutes. as for the radioactives if ur messin around with nuclear reactors(cuz the only other isotopes gettin hot enough are synthetic and made in breeder reactors) you are way past the stage of discovering fire. at that point just build an air-tight or floating blast furnace.
It's not the existence of thermal sources, it's the need or happenstance of using it as a tool. Cooking allows easier digestion of food, but what if all you eat is sushi? No need to use it for warmth because you are already adapted for your depth temperature, and no windy snow to necessitate sudden need.
@@virutech32 but also i'm talking about isotopes like polonium 210 and other natural isotopes, but not just that the water acts as a substance to slow down neutrons just enough that a deposit of uranium could react with itself to create things like plutonium, i don't see how it isn't possible to accidently discover nuclear reactors before you are "advanced" aftercall it's really by chance
@@bbirda1287 hat is true but maybe they like glowing hot rocks, and all of a sudden need to use it for heat or accidently drop something like metals into the pile of glowing rocks
This one wishes you had given the Hanar a mention human, and the Volus are very good examples of adapting to pressure differentials, and should be looked at in a later episode.
Jack Vance wrote an excellent novel about a spaceship full of criminals (a prison ship) that crashed into a world without land. Just one continuous ocean. Survivors (before the rocket sank forever) swam to the surface and survived on giant floating lilly pads. Then fast forward about 200 years and that's where the story starts. They built a series of towers for communications which were pretty much the 'clacks' from the Terry Pratchett 'Going Postal' book. The title: Blue World (1964) A good read.
Man i love that intro music. Also, we should build grappler ships (Outlaw Star fans would get this) to navigate our oceans before sending them to space.
Fire is not the only source of heat. I could imagine an evolutionary route where the intelligence explores the properties of phase change long before it can distinguish the differences between water ice and solid metal, or liquid water versus liquid metal. Some metals melt at temps that can occur below the boiling point of water.
Is hard for me to wrap my head around something underwater becoming so advanced because of how hard chemistry would be, but then I remembered how hard chemistry is anyway and I get over it.
Topic suggestion: TINY ALIENS. Imagine a world where the average cell size is much smaller than on Earth, or perhaps where bacteria evolved to multicellularity. Intelligent aliens much smaller than humans could evolve. What would make them interesting is that physics works different on a smaller scale. So, an alien the size of a praying mantis or smaller would interact with water differently (the surface tension of water would make a mug of water act more like Jello on that scale). Fire works differently (e.g. a candle flame differs in its behavior significantly from a human-sized campfire), plus fire would be a WMD for tiny creatures (e.g. a forest fire to an insect). So, something like a rocket stove or forge could be a massive collective project with high security, comparable to a nuclear power plant for us. But they'd have a much easier time getting to space, all other things being equal. The obvious follow-up: GIANT ALIENS. :)
I have a hypothesis for you: On an Earth-like water world, some large seamounts get high enough to get sunlight; say, upper mesopelagic to epipelagic. So, there your photosynthetic life can anchor and develop a form of kelp, or something similar. As time goes by, this seagrass either grows tall enough to reach the surface, dead plants float to the surface, or some combination thereof. The surface of these rafts of detritus - some as big as a large island - gets thick enough to dry. This could allow the discovery of fire in a species of sapient intelligence like cetaceans or squid and octopus. Especially if they have tentacles, like arthropods, or hands, like mermaids. One day, some of the dry material is struck by lightning and catches fire. It doesn't take long for some of the larger fires to capture the attention of some intelligent beings of human level intelligence or higher. After some centuries, or even millennia, of occasional experiments, said intelligence figures out how to make fire. They have long known that it needs air and needs to be dry because rain snuffs out the natural fires, so they make bathyspheres with some of the detritus to bring the whole operation to where they can reach it. Several thousand years later and they have a number of ways to make fire: 1) Electric start, using their equivalent of an electric eel, 2) Flint rocks, tried that because they emit a spark when struck, even under water, and 3) Friction start because of one legendary explorer making the controversial claim that he saw wave action rub some dry material together together, generating fire without a spark - something considered impossible at the time. Because sapient species play fast and loose with novelties and playtime, but tend to be more conservative with utility, it took Humans forever to figure out other uses for fire besides cooking, warmth, and basic metal casting. But, as with metal casting and smithery with us, once fire was discovered, the floodgates were opened. We went from copper and bronze to steel in just about 1500 years. They did it in just a couple centuries, or even a few decades, as they threw just about anything into the fire just to see what would emerge. From there, progress slowed as they sussed out physics, chemistry, etc, etc. But, in half the time it took us, they went from the discovery of steel to computers and "airscrapers"(towers reaching the surface). All told, from the discovery of fire to the first airscrapers, took less than three thousand years. Even if it took another several thousand years before discovering flight and rockets, if they discovered fire at the same time we did, they would have been colonizing offworld long before we built the pyramids.
The problem I have with aquatic space civilizations is that unless they migrate to land (and thus become more of land creatures than aquatic), I find it really hard that they would find fire to be useful because it would be difficult for aquatic creatures to study and use them. We are able to study fire because we don't have too many restrictions to do it. We don't have to hold our breaths, we don't need our skin to be constantly moist like aquatic creatures and such. The best analogy I could think of is in a weird universe, fire as we know it cannot exist on land but underwater. We humans, still unchanged and on land, noticed fire in the ocean and despite our curiosity, we could not go to it, and study it for long. So we end up ignoring it. That is unless we manage to evolve become mermaids to go into the ocean. Then there's the idea of mermaids or fish with hands. What situation would require them to develop hands instead of full blown flippers? Are there underwater trees for the mermaids to hold on to like how monkeys with trees? Even if there are, why would they grasp it? The more logical idea would be tentacles but it would lack strength to do heavy work needed to build civilization on land. And finally, I doubt any structure would last long underwater because of corrosion and erosion. Sure you could 'cheat' by using unrustable metal in its natural form but I find that if you want to make a believeable sci-fi, using unknown metal takes out a lot of the believeability.
One of the other issues with oceanic life is pottery. We don't think about it much, but there's a lot you can't do unless you can readily make containers. For us, pottery was our container for a very long time.
So if your water world is covered with mostly water trees would be very rare if not completely absent. An aquatic life form would not have metalurgy like we do. No furnaces and smelters. They would rely on organic technology. They would grow structures using chemical and bacterial methods to combine things like calcium and metal oxides. They might have a way to chemically bond metal oxides by removing the oxygen and depositing metal molecules to a fixed matrix. That way they can build shelters and eventually water craft. As for electrical systems well they might figure a way to that since many sea animals can produce electric charges.
I honestly never considered the advantages that oceanic based life would have in space - electroreception, adaption to living in cold, dark, empty environments, potentially adapted to spending long periods of time "hibernating". And it might actually be more likely than we think, there are many animals in the ocean today that show they have the ability to think beyond their natural adaptations (dolphins using sponges to lift up sand from the seabed, octopuses using coconuts and shells for defense). It just might take a bit longer than it took for us ;)
Listening to Isaac talk about water makes me remember the movie "Ice pirates" yes i am that old. Just makes you remember not to believe anything you see on TV/internet, unless Isaac tells you.
Could we get a video on galactopolis’s, or the galactic sized megastructures mentioned in the megastructures overview video, also revisit the warfare series to see what a k2 or higher civilizations wars might look like
Even isaac refers to the ideas of giant alien squids and spiders as terrifying. Really lends credence to the idea that the answer to the fermi paradox might be a sort of "prime directive" that might be more related to cultural advancement - specifically in the acceptance of the differences of others - than any specific technological advancements.
Hey, Isaac! At 6:51 it said that there would need to be sunlight for photosynthesis to occur, but a photosynthesizing species of bacteria was recently discovered in the midnight zone at a black smoker, subsisting off the glow of magma-- something similar could happen on an alien world!
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Organic aliens,
Isaac is so advanced in his sci-fi, he looped around to being regular sci-fi.
Pssshhh you can see organic aliens at any Whole Foods co-op. Just follow the smell of patchouli.
"Aaaaagh! Aliens have come to steal our water!"
"Oh no! Where are they?"
"The Oort cloud. .... around Alpha Centauri!"
Great observation! Why bother lifting something that dense out of a gravity well when the vast majority of it is just... floating out there. Same with every other raw resource. As much fun as it is in sci-fi, space wars would be essentially pointless and useless; because there's so much base material to pick up at your leisure, but getting your hi-end machinery blown up would be a huge loss.
For that matter, who would want to rule a planet anyway? Pain in the butt proposition that wouldn't get you anything you couldn't get a lot easier by just making or refurbishing a habitat and recruiting some friends who like the same lifestyle, and assemble some servo-bots. It may well be decadence rather than enlightenment that makes for peace in the galaxy :)
@@animistchannel2983 Why would anybody want to be king of a country? Pain in the butt having to run the place and guard against the others who want to be king and will be willing to kill you for it.
@@animistchannel2983 I imagine if there were space wars it would be in dyson swarms after some Kessler syndrome event destroyed the previous civilization and all the resources left were bound up in empty dead space habitats, which quickly run out. Then you could have a resource war with quadrillions of casualties
I doubt that would happen in real life, but it feels a lot more plausible to me, especially since the residents of the dyson swarm might have diverged so much from each other it’s actually a war between different species
@@animistchannel2983Thrill of the hunt my guy. Think of it like a game, if you have cheats the whole thing gets boring real quick so you might sometime turn them off for a challenge and in this case it's sl@ughtering some hairless apes
I'm starting to realize that I don't even have to be interested in the topic of the video title, I just know I'm going to learn awesome stuff no matter what
Seriously. 90% of Isaac's subject matter is probably things I didn't even know existed before I watched 😊
Soon there won't be a single aspect of science fiction untouched by isaac.
The ultimate speculative science fiction channel
Can Isaac concieve of an concept so obscure and complicated that even he can't clarify it?
Oh, there are areas he doesnt want to touch, because they are too controversial.
I'm still waiting on episode on immunology
I've been watching for two weeks and I still didn't watch all of it
Giant alien spider monsters roaming the universe that have children smarter than Einstein. Welp I understand the Fermi paradox now, everyone came to this conclusion and went into hiding.
Kill it with space fire
@@GrizzG13 ahem atomic fire or holy Light or laser that is powered by star
Hey arachnids generally are harmless even beneficial though ticks do unfortunately exist which is horrifying
Fun fact did you know that arachnids unlike most arthropods actually do have a endoskeleton?(Made of cartilage like early vertebrate skeletons ) Interestingly the clade arachnids are part of the chelicerates also turn out to have high energy UV fluorescence both in extant species and in fossils. (I guess this explains why ticks are so damned hard to kill)
As such space lasers probably wouldn't work very well against them as they are naturally radiation hardened.
(In fact based on more recent research they might actually have evolved to live on land prior to the formation of the Ozone layer and recolonized the seas in the Ordovician. Thankfully arachnids never evolved an efficient respiratory system and thus are limited by their ability to uptake oxygen.
Also did you know spiders have evolved electromagnetic gliding using the Earth's electric fields to propagate across continents and even oceans. And mites are everywhere including on all of us so if arachnid like organisms are common there will be no place to hide.
Though writing this raises a horrifying idea what if mites evolved an intelligent civilization in which case their planet would be... us. Now *that* would be terrifying
@@Dragrath1 dude i talk about a stellazor and nukes no amount of uv protection can save you from a death ray of giant fuck you laser
@@Dragrath1 i did not know bout that endo skeleton ish damn spiders are so cool. imma never understand that hate towards them. especially since Portia exists. just the bomb digs
"No more intelligent than a dolphin"
So long, farewell, and thanks for all the fish Isaac.
I want to see YOU typing without fingers :)
@@amcmr2003 I think we need to decouple "intelligence" from "technological intelligence". Just because it doesn't use technology, doesn't mean it isn't "intelligent" in some way. And if lack of technology makes it OK to pick on a group by a higher-tech group, then nothing wrong was done to stone-age tribes by higher-tech humans. :P
Shame how so little got the reference
@@boblazer9220 Some 80 some people did. I'm happy for that.
@LaikaLycanthrope For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much-the wheel, New York, wars and so on-whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man-for precisely the same reasons.
@@dongiovanni4331 :D
"What would life that evolved on an oceanic planet be like?"
Wet.
So.... just like us?
Moist.
Dank
Damp
Go on :)
12:05 "... alien super-spider and squid."
Have you played Subnautica? Sounds a lot like their Crabsquid. It is indeed... pleasant.
think there were also species like that in much older games that would be meh today, starflight I think was one from 1986.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight
I've thought about attempting to make a 3D model of the ship on the cover art a few times, then decided it wasn't worth the effort, lol.
@@Zarcondeegrissom I don't think the ship is that interesting. Would look better if the designer had given it thrusters maybe?
Re "What would an alien life be like that evolved on an oceanic planet?":
-
🙋♂️ Oooohh, I know this one.. wet.
[LAUGHS IN HYDROPHOBIC SKIN FOR ADVANCED HYDRODYNAMICS]
@@unsteadyeddy3107 Doesn't matter, water isn't wet either, it only makes things wet. So I guess that, if you survive it, you could get wet from magma
I genuinely belly laughed at this. Good job
But would they know they're wet? Enquiring minds want to know*.
*Classical reference
@@mpetersen6 Do you mean: Would they be aware of the influence by their medium? Or do you mean: Would they consider themselves normal and dry would be the odd state, mirrored to our view?
My first novel A Darkling Sea was set on a Europa-like moon in another star system, and I had lots of fun coming up with technology for the anaerobic, echolocating, lobster-like intelligent beings living in an ocean under the ice. They could do stonework (though they tended to grind rather than chip it), made extensive use of knitting and weaving with plant fibers, and could carve animal bones and shells. Their civilization was based on controlling the flow of hot nutrient-rich water from seafloor vents, in order to maximize the biological output. In the book I tried to imply they had an extremely old civilization: the human explorers gradually realize that the entire surface of the seabottom, even the "wilderness" areas far from any active vents, have been reshaped by the intelligent inhabitants. It's out of print now but still available as an ebook. When I saw this video topic I was very interested in seeing what Isaac's take on those issues would be.
Its kinda unsettling to think about that even the earths oceans (as well as the antarctic) could be ripe for aquatic species colonization
(A Movie was made about that called The Abyss I think)
And there are much more aquatic worlds compared to terrestrial ones (Europa Ganymede etc)
There have been many Russian "incidents" very deep in the sea. You never know what's die there..
@@UnknownPerson-cq3qv Lake Vostok is the most unsettling
I for one welcome our aquatic overlords.
@@TheLongasen japanese have predicted it(!)
The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham has that as a concept, though with the aliens likely coming from a gas giant instead
As usual very excellent content. I remember you did one show called “Crazy Aliens.” I wonder if you could do one on ‘Alien Trolls?” A species that likes causing mayhem for entertainment.
You mean 40k Orks? ;)
Dunno if that's so much "sci-fi" as that's basically 4chan n many of its boards lol
a race of GrayStillPlays, "alright, the only game that lets you divide the earth by zero, PlayGame Damnit!" lol. Oumuamua missed and it was only moving at 26km/s, "those are rookie numbers!" add all the zeros, how fast, yes, lol.
would it be trolls, or just "sarcastic aliens", hmmm, that may depend on the perspective, as that could easily end up with all calling the others oppressive dictators, and we need not even look at space-aged civilization for that, just look at earthlings that can't even get off their own rock let alone get out of there solar system despite broadcasting threats of war and tyranny against all life in the universe on an intermittent base, lol. I can only hope they do not know of the earth at all, or see it as jokes of an outrageous sarcastic nature, lol.
that wouldn't seem to be a trait a majority or even significant percentage of any civ would have since evolution tends not to favor sociopaths. even if it did it runs into the prob that an exociv would tend to limit the actions of its more annoying members if only to avoid an interstellar incident. good to remember that trolls are a severe minority, a really loud and annoying minority, but a minority nonetheless.
@@virutech32 yeah, agreed, it's far more likely to run across genuine sarcastic funny aliens than sociopaths. especially if they ever had to debug software or diagnose anything on a ship. I have no clue what this program is doing or what the input variables are, however I find that if I devide 'U' and 'V' by 1.4 the star charts look about right on the navigation display, lol.
"Alright, the only game that doesn't know the meaning of limits, Play Game Damnit!" lol. how much horsepower do you need for orbital maneuvers, I don't know, math is hard, adding nines is easy, all the horsepower, lol.
They couldn't get fire to advance...
Crabs smelting iron over underwater volcanic vents...
Not likely practical. If you could survive such close proximity to a vent to attempt this, you probably can't survive conditions away from it. And a moving forge is hard to use.
@@icecold9511 "the universe is old and slow might not matter"
@@icecold9511 They could still develop structures and the like near those smoke stacks ie Kurgesagt video on the same topic.
@@KRYMauL structures isn't the same thing as working metal. That takes a serious amount of heat energy. Nearly impossible amounts even on earth, for early civilization. And we have oxygen and wood. A water world....no realistic chance.
@@icecold9511 I see your point, but could an electric fish develop enough power to heat up a rock and create metals. Alternatively the species could make relatively advanced technology based on chitin and bioluminescent.
I’ve always loved the idea of oceanic aliens 👽❤️ anyone here ever played the game “subnautica” before?
Yes, I purged that heretical world of xeno filth in the name of the Emperor of Man
@@Colonel-Sigma and here I was, carefully avoiding wildlife to preserve its beauty... How heretical of me
That’s a great game. I wish it’d tell me less about what I was looking at, drawing your own conclusions and making your own notes is possibly the best part of its setting. (I really liked the game I was seeing in early access, I played it before we had the codex and after it officially declared itself complete.)
@@Colonel-Sigma lmao 40k shoutout
@@dashiellgillingham4579 couldn’t agree more
To many games hold your hand 🙄 like excuse me maybe I want to be lost in the wilderness, immersion duh 😂
This episode made me ponder this: Is there a SF story that features electroreceptive aliens who find the electromagnetic fields generated by, say, radio communication unpleasant, and consider human-populated worlds to be unbearably cacophonous? Would you use a smartphone if it sounded like a dental drill when in operation?
well now there would be a market for RFI blocking hoods.
Yes a series by Timothy Zahn were an encounter goes wrong when Earth ships use radar to locate Alien ships that are sensitive to radio and thus think they are under attack, sorry but i cannot remember what it was called.
John Scalzi kicks off one of his books (The Android's Dream iirc) with a politician sabotaging trade deals by aggravating an alien of a species sensitive to certain smells by using (wait for it)... modified farts. And then the story begins.
I know, i know. It's not QUITE the same thing. But i thought it was worth mentioning :D
That'd be highly, highly, unlikely. There are a myriad bodies in the universe that give off more radiation than our transmissions, and they'd be more likely to be bothered by their own sun, than us.
@@evertonpennant112 Intensity is a function of both source strength and distance. Just because they're not strong from half a galaxy away doesn't mean they'd want to physically visit our planet, or let us build an embassy in their cities, or whatever.
I feel like we are legit one of the first space visiting races out there. How awesome would it be if WE were the ones to explore the universe uplifting all the dolphin and squid people as we go😂 I doubt the spider people will need any help from us.
I've always thought that was the case.
Through us consciousness will spread everywhere and conquer the universe. and here we are thinking there's nothing special about us.
In the '80s cartoon Galaxy Rangers, uplifted dolphins were used in one episode. The dolphins were receiving a telepathic distress call from an intelligent aquatic race akin to the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Near the end, the dolphins pretended to the aliens that humans are the dolphins' trained pets.
considering how many, just want to be left alone to enjoy their lives without having others impose their ways on them, they probably spend their time focusing on their lives and seldom think of doing to others what they don't want done to them (being oppressed by an overlord). it's an iffy proposition to assume corruption and/or greed would never set in with the uplifters that may never get past looking down on or thinking "less of" the uplifted races (you were incapable of doing it on your own, we had to do it for you, like attitudes). Need we forget from 3000bc to around 300ad, Egyptians never wanted a 'better' afterlife, they only wanted a continuation of the life they had and loved in this world, I don't think they would be particularly happy if the life they had and loved was upended so they could never go back to it again. it's also a bit counterintuitive akin to bulldozing over a place like the grand canyon and slapping massive skyscrapers in its place, because you appreciate the way the location naturally looked, lol. uplifting brings a huge mountain of social political and ethical baggage with it.
that may very well be one of many reasons no alien has shown up at eath saying "here is how to make a galactic-G-15000 modem and how to create a Milkyway-wiki and space-book account", lol. not to say, humans may be like ants on a nature reserve that was never allocated for the animals that happened to evolve on that rock in the middle of the park. they ultimately may not know humans exsist, or care at all about earth life. At least 'if' humans get there, they can have the solace of achieving it themselves rather than being spoonfed the information and tech like an incapable infant.
We'd come off as the most impressively lonely species. Consider the act of serially uplifting alien species within the context of the Voyager probes and SETI; essentially, we've already sent nudes and a mixtape into the void, and have been staring at our proverbial screen ever since. This would be the equivalent of us going "If I can't find anyone to respond, than I'll create them!"
there's all kinds of technology that's not dependent on fire, and there's always lava if they really need it. what about developing chemistry near geothermal vents? what about sculpting coral analogs instead of metallurgy? what about developing air travel concepts by seeing bubbles? what about biopolymer-producing plants and microorganisms, or filter farming trace resources directly from the water?
people underestimate the true wealth of the ocean
I like the filter farming idea! Tiny pieces of metal would melt easier and quicker as well
I’m curious as to how they would develop the concept and then separate useful particles from the useless ones? 🤔
Believing fire being the only way technology can start just shows a lack of imagination. Great to see Isaac pointing out alternatives and workarounds.
I wouldn't call it a lack of imagination so much as a lack of evidence of it happening. I believe he did say in the video that it is entirely possible, and that for a species so different from our own, the order of technilogical development is not required to be the same in order to reach a similar outcome of solar system colonization.
@@88HELLJUMPER88 Maybe I should rephrase my comment. Before it sounded like I was accusing Isaac of a lack of imagination. And yes, we lack evidence of it ever happening. But a lack of evidence is not evidence against it.
@@captainstroon1555 i absolutely agree. Correlation is not causation. Im sure there are thousands of inconcievable ways life could start the road to intelligence. But attempting to guess how it could otherwise happen is a bit superflous at this point i think.
the coverage of topics on this channel is outstanding
Oxygen combustion fire may not be strictly necessary for conventional tech progression. Underwater, you could still have chemical reactions that produce the necessary heat for discovering metalworking, and driving machines. I'm no chemist, so I have no idea how likely or easy it would be, but it seems far from impossible.
Thought it would be about aliens on earth oceans but this is more interesting
For those you should play the original X-Com, Terror from the Deep. by Microprose. Awesome stuff. =)
So... space penguins? Some kind of alien living on a world with a subsurface ocean that somehow breached the ice and dives back in for food? That stuff sounds AWESOME.
Read "Fleet of Worlds" by Larry Niven and Lerner
Subnautica: Below Zero?
I think this breaks the premise. If they returned for AIR (as in oxygen) because they can only breath underwater then yes, this could evolve into a fire yelding civ.
Imagine sentient aliens living beneath a frozen crust, on a planet with no atmosphere, but they've reached a level of technology similar to what ancient China had when that one guy made a rocket throne, and they're trying to drill through their crust, not knowing they will cause a cataclysmic event.
Meanwhile, members of a xeno-anthropology team from earth are trying to find a way to send a waring to these aliens without breaking the ice themselves.
Well, no snack and a drink for me today (started a diet), but will happily chow down on some awesome new SFIA!
Don't be too harsg on yourself, how about some tea and veggies? :)
Children of Time is a great book about intelligent spiders. Its sequel also has intelligent octopuses
Now I wanna see a space-faring merpeople civilisation XD
Cloners... Those Kaminoans
@@xDemos13
I'm afraid I didn't get the reference :(
@@PerfectAlibi1 starwars reference
@@danieluchwal3515
Never heard of them XD
@@PerfectAlibi1 so it it was an r/woooosh for then 🤣🤣
Isaac finds an interesting topic every single week. It's astonishing! Thanks Isaac Arthur channel/team
It helps that there is a long backlog of topics, some of them user submitted.
An inverted civilization built on the bottom of an ice sheet would be dope
I'm wondering if ocean planet creatures might develop flight if there is no land. I can see the structures in water being very similar to what is required for underwater so the possibility of going straight to flight is possible, especially the thicker the atmosphere is, or the lighter the gravity. Maybe? Animals that develop traits to get out of the ocean (living on the ice, eating in the water) would have a major advantage, as did our first land dwelling creatures.
The under ice air pocket/tunnel is one possibility that I never encountered before. But now that I did, I wonder what could be the possibilities for one's characteristics.
I wouldn't assume, that the walls of such air chambers would need to be made out of ice, once evolution had a field day with them. There could be several types of alien ecosystems, that could transform such environments to something complete different from what we would envision when thinking about them: coral like aliens, that deposit silica, and other minerals to the walls, turning it into a more traditional cavern, or coral reef, living mats that grow fur, to keep the heat from their body from escaping, or animals that insulate their tunnels from wetness and cold by coating it with webbing, not to mention just plain old overgrowth from chemoautotrophic flora, feeding on chemicals raising from volcanic activity down below. I never thought that the possibilities of life trapped under the ice could have such interesting pathways to alien environments.
Really, life's ability to transform it's environment rarely brought up when discussing the chances of life developing in water worlds. Like, the possibility of life creating floating environments: Take some photosynthetic life form, from microorganisms to shallow water plant analogs, that compete for light. Learning to float on the surface would be a clear advantage for such a creature, and all it would take for it to learn is to keep bubbles inside it. If it develops large colonies, and ecosystems surrounding it, the development of large swimming islands made out of life. With enough buoyancy, and the competition for light continuing, there could be even grass and trees, and whole jungles, with fauna to match, without there ever being land on the surface. Oceanic worlds are underestimated and underappreciated.
Liquid eternity flows through our veins
We are Forever
On a pearl of water near Alpha Pegasi
"Wrong."
-DJ Trump
Didn't expect to find this reference here, but its so satisfying.
I just want to say, Issac is honestly such a good narrator, he should work for nation geographic.
Your videos are one of the few good things that happened to me in 2020.
Here's to 2021 and sciencce saving the day again.
Intelligent amphibious crustaceans that build primitive stacked apartments from sand, smashing and distributing food with hammerhand pincers.
They could also have nimble tentacles around their mouth.
Me: Has thelasaphobia.
Also Me: Clicks on Oceanic Aliens because I love Isaac.
One of my favorite episodes for sure! Made me think of that movie Arrival, even though those aliens weren't water-based. Why nobody has thought of making a movie about this type of life? Would be truly interesting, and properly alien
Imagine Space Spiders setting up a web of probes offering promise of first contact and knowledge sharing only to be waiting in suspended animation for their victims to show up at the center of their probe web.
Lol web of probes is appropriate for spider people
Be funnier if they looked nothing like spiders 😂
Why do we call them spider people they look like skinny walruses?
it’s not them it’s the probes! 😂 the sleeping skinny walruses!
I usually just listen to your videos in the background, and I'm not sure what I thought you looked like, but seeing your face in the tail end of the video was so unnerving! Keep up the good work, Isaac!
This is such an awesome topic. I love to study Marine Biology and it's my major in college. It's amazing to think that there are most probably entire oceanic ecosystems on other worlds for us to hopefully explore one day!
This is the best place to just get lost in sci-fi. Listening to these videos is seriously a form of meditation. I love your content and delivery of it
The Raycon ear buds remind me of the earpieces we often saw being used by Uhura and Spock in the original Star Trek series.
U mean this giant cone ones
great video ISAAC :) congrats !
When you talked about oceans worlds with a shallow depth I was like, "hey, that's how you can have "land" animals. The seafloor would be like the ground on a terrestrial landmass, full of smaller plants down below with bigger ones which would rise up in search of the sunlight. You might see giant forests spring up, rising from the ocean floor, looking like bald cypress trees. Then you'd have animals evolve to be able to climb out of the water to feed on these plants. Then boom, "land" based life, but it is more like an ecosystem of a jungle canopy without the forest floor.
Very fun.
A sandbar, mangrove shallows styled world, with warm oceans and not much depths.
What about flying fish? In a thicker atmosphere they could glide farther, and perhaps eventually become fully amphibious. That could open up further options for life on such planets.
I see Dorado hunting flying fish at sea, they work together with birds, who catch them when they fly. So that niche would be available on a planet with no birds. So the alien equivalent of Dorado might eventually evolve true flight. The flying fish also might evolve to live out of water, but that would just provide a new niche for their hunters too.
"THE ABYSS."- James Cameron watch it thank me later if ocean aliens are your thing.
Well it is rumoured that Avatar 2 is going to be mostly in underwater Pandora, if that film ever comes out
Very good film... surreal ending if you view the extended cut
@@mitchellconnop2000 man I would love to be a fly on the wall for that production.
They weren't aliens they're terrestrial beings or indigenous to Earth that evolved in the oceans over millions of years
I was wondering about them. Thank you Isaac.
Is there any way you might consider an episode on unconscious aliens, similar to those found in Peter Watts’ Blindsight? Just finished it myself and it was a crazy interesting concept and I’m curious what you think. Love the video and been a long time subscriber to the channel. Keep up the great work, Mr. Arthur!
Never been this early
that the most common comment I ever seen in youtube
Neither have I tbh
@Eastern fence Lizard OOF
Same
@@OnxGrid "That's got to be the most frequent comment I've ever seen."
"So it would seem..."
Perfect timing, I was getting my Space Engineer game started.
All hail the Wrath of Clang.
All hail building a fully functional outpost by smelting a 15m wide, 50m deep column of dirt with the power of wind turbines.
Man i LOVE your videos. Stumbled across you a month or so ago and ive been trying to watch it all. Thank you!
"Let's me listen to audio books in a noisy crowd"
I can't wait until that's a legitimate problem again…
I hate noisy crowds soo.. yeah no hurry. And noise cancelling headphones are awesome in the bus.
You can get the same quality of earphone at 5 times less the cost of Raycons. They’re seriously not very high quality. But hey, if this show needs funding, I’m all for it. Whatever gets us more Isaac Arthur!
Life in the ocean world may not have to follow life in our seas and oceans. There is a rather universal caveat though. Life in our deep ocean trenches has limitations set by both coldness and pressures that slow biological processes. Indeed at extreme depth basic cellular life processes become extremely difficult.
Because of that shallow water life would seem most likely to evolve into more complex forms.
In a deep ocean world you entire resource base would be water. Hard to build a tech society with only water. You would need at leas a significant amount of shallow ocean areas to broaden your resource base.
Whales and dolphins are land based animals that returned to the sea so they are out of the equation also.
An entirely different and alien biology is needed, but that’s what this program is about.
Nautilus in space ?
Hi, Isaaaac. I'm a huge fan of your videos and have found them to be of unprecedented quality. For that, Thank You.
I wanted to tell you about some stuff I've been working on, if that's ok with you. By sheer chance, I was just writing a hard-sci-fi short story about a race of intelligent aliens similar to cephalopods and their technological history in the sea of their world recently - and my friend recommended me this video!
I've been having a lot of fun imagining how they might have developed technology without fire and agree with some of your ideas about how it might come about, for example the best tools to begin with would likely be other organisms, their bones, organs, and fibers. I call the species Artifex Rétes Sapiens (thinking net makers), or just The Rétes, because weaving is as central to their technology as fire is to ours. They have an octopoid intelligence rather different from ours and weave kelp forests into large dwellings and enclosures for the handful of animal species they've managed to domesticate, using an instinctual habit of twisting and twining that they've slowly learned to refine and perfect. They use air sacks of both plants and animals to float clay to the surface to harden and scratch to make records, especially of weaving patterns. They developed mathematical theories of topology and knotwork before even developing a proper base system for counting and have an excellent intuitive grasp of 3D kinematics, especially for non-rigid bodies, since their tentacles, which embody much of their intelligence, are so similar to the fibers they work with. I imagined that they would, much as you suggest, use the concentrated heat from hydrothermal vents, in this case to reshape organisms similar to glass sponges into fiberglass-like strands, which give them access to much higher tensile strength materials as well as giving them the ability to plastically deform rigid bodies that can then be solidified into tools, traps, weapons for use against themselves (naturally their biggest competition), etc. It's been interesting to try and come up with scientifically valid and practically realistic ways that such a species' civilization might develop. For example, could they develop sails that float above the water for long-distance travel? I very much like the idea of ships which the occupants pilot from Under the water!
I concluded that it was theoretically possible, but very very difficult, for such a species to develop high technology similar to ours, and that it might be more likely for them to pursue branches of technology more suited to their environment and particular kind of embodied intelligence. I'd love to hear more from you about possible ways that technology in general could develop in ways different from how it's developed here on Earth.
Thank you so much for your time (and your excellent videos) and I wish you the best of luck in the future!
YAY! Arthursday is here!
Developing rocketry on a water world?
You'd need a Robert Cod-dard or a Werner Von Brown trout.
I accept the chorus of pained groans at the awful puns.😉
XD nice
Don't change, my friend. 👍
I'll raise you- the rocket equation by SOLE-kovsky
Have you considered doing an episode on non-animalistic sapiens such as sapient Oceans or planets? You seem to have covered most other Sci Fi tropes, and there are several examples of these. Check out the excellent Civ game, Alpha Centauri which featured a very interesting, and on the surface, well thought out idea for a sapient planet.
Thinking about alien environments I thought of what will happen to future earth if the sun doesn't vaporise it first. Eventually the cooling molten core will go solid and we, or whoever, will lose our electromagnetic shield and, perhaps more importantly, stop having plate tectonics. The remaining mountains would wear down and fill the deeper oceanic trenches. The water level would therefore rise, leaving little dry land. So when we find water-worlds we may find aquatic alien species that developed on land and eventually was forced into the water. So it may well have technologies discovered on land, and space flight and even might be amphibious. Space traversing frogs.
Transporting and processing water for their spawn, using plants as hydroponic filters.
This is just a fantastic channel. The amount of research gone into each video is incredible.
Great episode, especially crammed into a 26-minute time frame. Every time I thought, "but what about...?" ...and then you covered that next; or it was such a big can of worms, it couldn't possibly be done justice in a quick survey of possibilities like this. I really only have a couple addenda where oceanic creatures would actually have an advantage in science/engineering thinking over land animals.
Rocketry. It might be harder to build the technology, but Newton's laws are actually more evident in a liquid environment. The squid people and whale-types would understand jet propulsion before they ever banged the first rocks together, and it would be inherent in their sense of travel. They would also automatically get the notion that what drifts, keeps drifting.
Ideal gas laws and displacement, and the notion of mass vs weight. These principles took humans a long time to sort out, but oceanic creatures would be faced with obvious examples all the time.
Multidimensional thinking. An undersea environment with currents having to be taken into account provides more dimensions to manipulate to start with, and immediate use of multi-vector thinking. Orbital mechanics and so on would be practically built into their intuition.
So even taking into account that metallurgy would be a pain to get going, some of the crucial ways of thinking to become of spacefaring civilization and comfortable among the "sea of stars" would actually come more naturally to creatures that started out in a sea to start with.
In particular, give an ocean world just a few pips of mineral-rich volcanic mountains sticking up into the atmosphere, and they could very well have the evolutionary advantage. In a way, that's exactly the aspect of earth that made the concept and usefulness of "ships" the crucial idea in the first place.
I wish i knew you had a code a few weeks ago, I just bought a pair of the work models & I love them. More comfortable than any other earbud I've used & you are indeed correct about the battery. Pairing is mildly annoying if you want to pair with other phones, I have to reset the things to do so, which means my phone looses its connection & has to be paired back up. Found that out when I lent them to my coworker to try.
I really can't appreciate you enough, these lectures are truly amazing. I'm lucky to be in an age where I have access to such knowledge, thank you so much!
It's funny to think that for a water world, "outer space" begins at the water's surface.
im pretty sure its impossible for their to be no interface between water and vacuum. there must be some atmosphere, and if not there would probably be a gradual change from liquid to gas as it slowly thinned into the vacuum of space.
@@samvrit you didn't get what he meant right?
@@gogoida1280 that as soon as the water ended space began?
@@samvrit I think he meant that the idea of outer space of those underwater aliens would start at the water's surface
@@gogoida1280 yeah so what i said was just like how for humans, space starts beyond our atmosphere, for them space will also start beyond their atmosphere. it cant just be the waters surface and then boom we're in space, that wont work because waters a fluid. either the surface will be a solid layer of ice or it will have an atmosphere
I love how you blend sci fi with future fact. In a digestible way for my tiny human brain
Has anyone else ever wondered if Isaac is himself an alien...?
Where the shadows lie
If he was he wouldn't be able to help himself and he would just admit it for the sake of getting good information out there. His desire to spread a wealth of knowledge would be his own downfall and I think he would be okay with that
If they really wanted to help without causing to much upset, they would come as teachers.
He is alien to me (aka a stranger)
i just realised when he said african catfish, that he's referring to barbel also called vundu, also very slipperu fish as it will try and escape back to the water if you dont secure your cooler box for taking it home, they can breathe air but not for long, ive lost some fish that escaped but couldn't quite make it back to the water.
isaac arthur i love your channel and you might be the reason why the world changed
8:59 By the way this reminds me of an extremly intelligent alien specie from an oceanic world of shallow reefs wich spent its time observing the stars without technology, in the comic book serie Valerian and Laureline...
I remember that series, so underrated. One of the first French comics I read. Lots of Star Wars is suspiciously similar....
Harry Harrison wrote the West of Eden trilogy. The Yilane developed a technological civilization without fire. Although they begin in the ocean, most time is spent on land.
Wasn't that the story which theorised that the meteor which took out the dinosaurs...missed?
Alien super-spiders and squids is literally what the book Children of Ruin is all about. Highly recomended, although you might want to read the first book first.
i think the concept "where fire doesn't exist" is a bit wrong because you still ahve things like thermal vents that can get quite hot or even themn you got decaying radioactive metals that can achieve the same temperature
yeah but ore hot enough to be reduced is generally also hot enough to react with the water around it. heat isnt the only thing you need to smelt stuff. not to mention that heat travels more through water so ur gettin awful close to some scorching hot water wich is prolly gunna kill long before you get any of it smelted even if you could. on top of that the area around thermal vents is often also rich in pretty toxic/corrosive solutes. as for the radioactives if ur messin around with nuclear reactors(cuz the only other isotopes gettin hot enough are synthetic and made in breeder reactors) you are way past the stage of discovering fire. at that point just build an air-tight or floating blast furnace.
It's not the existence of thermal sources, it's the need or happenstance of using it as a tool. Cooking allows easier digestion of food, but what if all you eat is sushi? No need to use it for warmth because you are already adapted for your depth temperature, and no windy snow to necessitate sudden need.
@@virutech32 what i mean is putting a bunch of rocks in a pile to only comeback and see it's gotten red hot
@@virutech32 but also i'm talking about isotopes like polonium 210 and other natural isotopes, but not just that the water acts as a substance to slow down neutrons just enough that a deposit of uranium could react with itself to create things like plutonium, i don't see how it isn't possible to accidently discover nuclear reactors before you are "advanced" aftercall it's really by chance
@@bbirda1287 hat is true but maybe they like glowing hot rocks, and all of a sudden need to use it for heat or accidently drop something like metals into the pile of glowing rocks
This one wishes you had given the Hanar a mention human, and the Volus are very good examples of adapting to pressure differentials, and should be looked at in a later episode.
Never even this early !! Yay it’s 5am but I’m up and watching ♥️ thanks Isaac
I'm watching this while I'm doing my school work, keep up the good work 😁👍
Jack Vance wrote an excellent novel about a spaceship full of criminals (a prison ship) that crashed into a world without land. Just one continuous ocean. Survivors (before the rocket sank forever) swam to the surface and survived on giant floating lilly pads. Then fast forward about 200 years and that's where the story starts. They built a series of towers for communications which were pretty much the 'clacks' from the Terry Pratchett 'Going Postal' book. The title: Blue World (1964) A good read.
An Isaac Arthur video about oceanic aliens. Time grab some coffee and smoke me a kipper.
Space spiders have some serious sci-fi horror possibilities.
Man i love that intro music.
Also, we should build grappler ships (Outlaw Star fans would get this) to navigate our oceans before sending them to space.
So long, and thanks for all the fish!!
Fire is not the only source of heat. I could imagine an evolutionary route where the intelligence explores the properties of phase change long before it can distinguish the differences between water ice and solid metal, or liquid water versus liquid metal. Some metals melt at temps that can occur below the boiling point of water.
Isaac, you are one of my favorite youtubers, Keep up the good work!
1k views in 8 mins. Congrats You have earned this.
2 years from now Issac drops a video, the world experiences a momentary energy drain from massive youtube use.
Is hard for me to wrap my head around something underwater becoming so advanced because of how hard chemistry would be, but then I remembered how hard chemistry is anyway and I get over it.
Topic suggestion: TINY ALIENS. Imagine a world where the average cell size is much smaller than on Earth, or perhaps where bacteria evolved to multicellularity. Intelligent aliens much smaller than humans could evolve. What would make them interesting is that physics works different on a smaller scale. So, an alien the size of a praying mantis or smaller would interact with water differently (the surface tension of water would make a mug of water act more like Jello on that scale). Fire works differently (e.g. a candle flame differs in its behavior significantly from a human-sized campfire), plus fire would be a WMD for tiny creatures (e.g. a forest fire to an insect). So, something like a rocket stove or forge could be a massive collective project with high security, comparable to a nuclear power plant for us.
But they'd have a much easier time getting to space, all other things being equal.
The obvious follow-up: GIANT ALIENS. :)
I have a hypothesis for you: On an Earth-like water world, some large seamounts get high enough to get sunlight; say, upper mesopelagic to epipelagic. So, there your photosynthetic life can anchor and develop a form of kelp, or something similar. As time goes by, this seagrass either grows tall enough to reach the surface, dead plants float to the surface, or some combination thereof. The surface of these rafts of detritus - some as big as a large island - gets thick enough to dry. This could allow the discovery of fire in a species of sapient intelligence like cetaceans or squid and octopus. Especially if they have tentacles, like arthropods, or hands, like mermaids.
One day, some of the dry material is struck by lightning and catches fire. It doesn't take long for some of the larger fires to capture the attention of some intelligent beings of human level intelligence or higher. After some centuries, or even millennia, of occasional experiments, said intelligence figures out how to make fire. They have long known that it needs air and needs to be dry because rain snuffs out the natural fires, so they make bathyspheres with some of the detritus to bring the whole operation to where they can reach it.
Several thousand years later and they have a number of ways to make fire:
1) Electric start, using their equivalent of an electric eel,
2) Flint rocks, tried that because they emit a spark when struck, even under water, and
3) Friction start because of one legendary explorer making the controversial claim that he saw wave action rub some dry material together together, generating fire without a spark - something considered impossible at the time.
Because sapient species play fast and loose with novelties and playtime, but tend to be more conservative with utility, it took Humans forever to figure out other uses for fire besides cooking, warmth, and basic metal casting. But, as with metal casting and smithery with us, once fire was discovered, the floodgates were opened. We went from copper and bronze to steel in just about 1500 years. They did it in just a couple centuries, or even a few decades, as they threw just about anything into the fire just to see what would emerge. From there, progress slowed as they sussed out physics, chemistry, etc, etc. But, in half the time it took us, they went from the discovery of steel to computers and "airscrapers"(towers reaching the surface).
All told, from the discovery of fire to the first airscrapers, took less than three thousand years. Even if it took another several thousand years before discovering flight and rockets, if they discovered fire at the same time we did, they would have been colonizing offworld long before we built the pyramids.
The problem I have with aquatic space civilizations is that unless they migrate to land (and thus become more of land creatures than aquatic), I find it really hard that they would find fire to be useful because it would be difficult for aquatic creatures to study and use them. We are able to study fire because we don't have too many restrictions to do it. We don't have to hold our breaths, we don't need our skin to be constantly moist like aquatic creatures and such.
The best analogy I could think of is in a weird universe, fire as we know it cannot exist on land but underwater. We humans, still unchanged and on land, noticed fire in the ocean and despite our curiosity, we could not go to it, and study it for long. So we end up ignoring it. That is unless we manage to evolve become mermaids to go into the ocean.
Then there's the idea of mermaids or fish with hands. What situation would require them to develop hands instead of full blown flippers? Are there underwater trees for the mermaids to hold on to like how monkeys with trees? Even if there are, why would they grasp it? The more logical idea would be tentacles but it would lack strength to do heavy work needed to build civilization on land.
And finally, I doubt any structure would last long underwater because of corrosion and erosion. Sure you could 'cheat' by using unrustable metal in its natural form but I find that if you want to make a believeable sci-fi, using unknown metal takes out a lot of the believeability.
Just found this channel and I absolutely love it. I love his voice too, could listen for hours, which I intend to do.
Thanks for the great episode as always!
One of the other issues with oceanic life is pottery. We don't think about it much, but there's a lot you can't do unless you can readily make containers. For us, pottery was our container for a very long time.
So if your water world is covered with mostly water trees would be very rare if not completely absent. An aquatic life form would not have metalurgy like we do. No furnaces and smelters. They would rely on organic technology. They would grow structures using chemical and bacterial methods to combine things like calcium and metal oxides. They might have a way to chemically bond metal oxides by removing the oxygen and depositing metal molecules to a fixed matrix. That way they can build shelters and eventually water craft. As for electrical systems well they might figure a way to that since many sea animals can produce electric charges.
Thx for another entertaining and interesting video. Keep up the good work!!
I honestly never considered the advantages that oceanic based life would have in space - electroreception, adaption to living in cold, dark, empty environments, potentially adapted to spending long periods of time "hibernating". And it might actually be more likely than we think, there are many animals in the ocean today that show they have the ability to think beyond their natural adaptations (dolphins using sponges to lift up sand from the seabed, octopuses using coconuts and shells for defense). It just might take a bit longer than it took for us ;)
Listening to Isaac talk about water makes me remember the movie "Ice pirates" yes i am that old. Just makes you remember not to believe anything you see on TV/internet, unless Isaac tells you.
@21:00 the rationale for water life with echolocation to evolve into air breathing amphibians is... a brilliant insightful
Could we get a video on galactopolis’s, or the galactic sized megastructures mentioned in the megastructures overview video, also revisit the warfare series to see what a k2 or higher civilizations wars might look like
same. I want an "intergalactic warfare" video. Eventually, a K4 Wars video would be the tits
@@JohnPritzlaff this channel definitely has the ambition to take this topic on
If the planet was active enough couldn’t the smart sea life use under water volcanos as a substitute for fire?
Boiling is usually not conducive to life. I could be wrong, though, so don't let me stop you from trying.
nah high-temp water reacts with most transision metels(oxidising them) at smelting temps
Even isaac refers to the ideas of giant alien squids and spiders as terrifying.
Really lends credence to the idea that the answer to the fermi paradox might be a sort of "prime directive" that might be more related to cultural advancement - specifically in the acceptance of the differences of others - than any specific technological advancements.
Hey, Isaac! At 6:51 it said that there would need to be sunlight for photosynthesis to occur, but a photosynthesizing species of bacteria was recently discovered in the midnight zone at a black smoker, subsisting off the glow of magma-- something similar could happen on an alien world!
Love your channel, Isaac!!
I hope that one day Isaac will make a video about Humanoid Aliens (Although "Bipedal Aliens" would be more accurate).
omg yes! that would be awesome
Greetings my sentient sapient bipedal carbon based lifeform originated from the Gregorian calendar on planet known as earth
Looking forward to it!
It looks back at you!! 🙃