Who’s to say that, across the Gulf of Mexico, dolphin minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, are not regarding this land with envious eyes?
Good question. Let’s say that humans have been extinct for so long that beyond idea-spurring items nothing functional exists (save the Large Hadron Collider). They can learn from some items, say a flint lighter that works a few times before crumbling, but nothing much beyond that. Artefacts do give tantalizing clues about the possibilities (and the sharp dolphin minds can extrapolate a lot), but there are no working machines to instantly add technology to dolphin culture.
Exactly. There’s a Wells’ spring of ideas and desires that would come from the first observations of land-based fire–most likely coming from the Click Observatory.
Socialism!
I think beast-of-burden labor and domestication would be the key to them getting around to industrializing. First step would be enlisting some transitional workers with the ability to work on land for short periods, like walruses or sea lions.
Even better, if river dolphins, with their uncannily advanced kelp snares and nets, capture a bunch of giant river otters and breed them for slave labor, then they have a dexterous intelligent worker/slave class. Otters are perfectly capable of working a forge bellows. Of course, the dolphin overseers would keep them in line while being transported in their war elephant-borne kelp tubs, filled with water for long-term surface oversight.
To be totally clear, are there not even materials that can be adapted? I’m assuming no, that there are not, for example, aluminum plates from ships that could be adapted for other uses.
That said, here’s what I’m wondering: if they see fire, they might be very tempted to experiment with it. And while they can’t naturally experiment with it below-water, they could create some sort of bladder from natural materials, perhaps overlapping skins sewn together, large enough to create an underwater bubble in which they could experiment.
They could similarly create floating rafts anchored in protected bays, and they could experiment with fire on these rafts.
Someone might, having seen human artifacts made of metal, decide to experiment with putting these artifacts in the fire-rafts, and through doing so might determine some of the effects of metal. They might also discover glass much earlier, and if they can figure out a system for glassblowing, they might be able to focus scientific attention on non-metallurgical chemistry much earlier than humans did.
I also anticipate advanced use of pneumatics, pumps, and differential pressure to solve problems earlier than humans did. Working with skins and bones should be realtively easy (although they’ll need some sort of watertight container before they can easily tan hides, and even then they’ll need to develop some process to make the hides water-resistant).
Fun question!
It’s kind of hard to develop technology inside a huge vat of solvent. But dolphins aren’t excluded from the air. They could build floats that operate in the air. Maybe they could smelt metal in deep sea volcanoes. I’m not counting on any of that happening easily for dolphins, but it doesn’t sound absolutely impossible. Maybe they’d just find an easy path to telekinesis and all of our human hardware would seem amateurish.
Maybe they need to develop something like this first.
Only if humans put them on rocketships and blasted them there.
Why would they want too? :eek:
They wouldn’t be dolphins then. They would be something else. Perhaps a dolphin descendent that decided to move back to land sometime in the future could develop all the stuff needed to develop technology, which might lead to flight and perhaps space exploration. Dolphins, as they are today, would never be capable of building even rudimentary technology, let alone space flight.
I’d say they would be screwed when the hyper-space bypass went in, unfortunately.
-XT
Let’s say, Dolphins, as we know them, are given the intelligence of mankind.
We are not around, nor any of our artifacts for them to stumble upon.
Let’s remove the suseptibility of religious beliefs from their mentality.
I don’t know enough about dolphins to understand how social they are, but let’s assum governments, civilization and a society forms. Classes evolve from this, where upon getting to the point of intelligent philosophizing on par with the ancient Greeks would probably take quite a bit longer for them to arrive at since a lot of their underwater life is an environment removed to a lot of natural phenomena we take for granted.
Fire and the stars/heavenly bodies would be a huge obsticle for them to study and solve. To reach the level of metallurgy and simple machines to gain mechanical advantage and chemistry on par with Rome and Arabia, would seem to be very difficult to obtain, with water being such a hinderence to a lot of important chemical reactions. But their motives would be fundamentally different. The might figure out the importance of oxygen, and realize the water they breathe is made of ~33%, and the air above that is ~20%.
Could they develop their own machinations of chemistry? Discover electricity? Separate hydrogen, sodium and oxygen from the water the breathe? Work out the proper mathematics and physical equations of even classical mechanics? discovering electromagnetism and radio (which doesn’t work all that great in salt water)? Createing a vacuum? Derive rocketry and aerospace tech? A dolphin exploring land in a reverse scuba suit is one thing, but learning to fly? etc.
It seems to me, being on land affords us a vast luxury to explore and even intuit a lot of the scientific advancements we’ve been able to achieve over the last few thousand years. Only now are our experiments taking us out of the realm of our comfort zone and practicality, with new scientific ground barely able to be broken as we reach the end of the convenince and natural happenstance we’ve enjoyed. Now, it takes energies and resolving power orders of magnitude higher than it ever has just to peel back that next layer into the micro and macro world, let alone apply it to the everyday.
Good luck, Dolphins!
Another thing to consider: Written communication, overcoming the handing down of information over centuries (I can’t imagine salt water being any more forgiving than air on our stone, skins, papyrus and paper documents and books), and building computing power and electronics at least on par with the Apollo program.
Maybe Dolphins are intelligent, but they are all Dolphin lit majors and can’t actually create any technology.
Okay, let me turn this little thought experiment in a different direction. (With the OP’s forgiveness. If this totally violates the spirit of the OP, then please ignore.)
Let’s take the perspective that we humans are, in fact, the dolphins. In exploring space outside our home environment, are we facing the same hurdles that our hypothetical dolphins are facing? Is there some being out there looking at us and thinking, “Aren’t they cute with their little spacesuits. Too bad they’ll never achieve <something fundamentally obvious to them> because they’re stuck on a planet with air.” Is there something like fire that we fail to grasp?
In looking over my post here, I’m not sure that I made much sense. I just wanted to postulate that we humans are acting as our hyper-intelligent dolphins, exploring an environment for which we are ill-equipped.
In the Uplift Universe (see uplift wars by David Brin), Humans have bred dolphins as a client species. The book presents dolphins as the best pilots because they have ages of evolution in three dimensional motion.
[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]
In the Uplift Universe (see uplift wars by David Brin), Humans have bred dolphins as a client species. The book presents dolphins as the best pilots because they have ages of evolution in three dimensional motion.
[/QUOTE]
Didn’t sentient dolphins figure into some of the Pern books as well (though not as space pilots)?
-XT
…
Containment of all sorts of things is harder in the ocean. It’s much more difficult to establish agriculture if you have to fence things in fully on all sides. It’s much more difficult to experiment with chemistry or electricity since water will quickly dissolve, diffuse, and conduct your concentrations, heat, and voltages away. I don’t know if those are insurmountable, but they might be.
I expect that if intelligent dolphins were able to effect complicated technology, it would arise out of a much deeper understanding of biology and biochemistry than, say, metallurgy and electronics, and a wide variety of companion species bred/designed to do certain things. You don’t need to learn how to smelt metal if you can convince some creatures to extrude structures directly.
:smack:
Of course dolphins don’t breathe the water… Stoopid aquatic mammals.
That was my point exactly. An intelligent dolphin-like species could affect the world by use of the ‘plastic arts’, Olaf Stapledon’s term for biotechnology.