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CCC comments on The Octopus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale - Less Wrong
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But how you imagine that would work? How will a longer timespan help?
Let's picture that we literally took 10 000 top human engineers and scientists, with all our human knowledge, into dolphin bodies, on another planet with no human artefacts. So, our dolphin people now need to somehow develop a way of writing down their knowledge underwater, which they can only do very laboriously because they haven't got hands. They can write very large letters with immense energy expenditure per letter. They can barely store any knowledge. They also got short lifespan and sharks to worry about.
And on the tools side, you need tools that are good enough so you can use them to make better tools. That generally requires ability to harden things - make something while it's soft, let it harden, use something softer to crack apart something harder. And to get that started, you need hands, because without hands you can only make the kind of tools that doesn't help you make better tools.
If you can't make an improvement in any single generation, you can't make any improvement in a thousand generations either.
Meanwhile, a planet populated with those same scientists and engineers in human bodies - hell, dog bodies, cat bodies, elephant bodies - would've had it all sorted out in no time. They'd have steel, electricity, running water, radio, and so on, in less than a generation - hell even 10 people can do that.
(assuming they all cooperate).
The gap due to the body shape and environment appears utterly immense. The only hope would be that dophins would evolve much greater than human intelligence and come up with something that we can't come up with (e.g. mind controlling some animal with hands).
edit: That is not to say a small number of top scientists and engineers would single handedly create industrial manufacturing, but that is to say they would re-create pre-industrial village level technology and then hand-make many important bits of 20th century technology. You can take a 16th century blacksmith's forge and make an electric generator in there, a spark gap transmitter, a coherer receiver, a carbon arc lamp, and the like, using most basic materials and hand manufacturing techniques. Indeed that's how the early instances of all those things were made - by a small number of top engineers, often in their spare time, without advance knowledge.
They don't need to write it down, they just need to store it. A certain amount of knowledge can be "stored" as oral tradition; alternatively, a lot more knowledge can be stored as (say) a pattern of rocks, carefully gathered and moved into position, in an area that can be easily visited.
Some knowledge will almost certainly be lost in the first few generations, despite that.
Oral traditions decay quickly, though. And rock placement is an example of far higher effort per letter. The point is, they find it much harder to retain knowledge. If the rate of loss is greater than the rate of creation, there's no progress at all.
And even after you're storing the knowledge, you're still entirely out of luck on tools. Even if they have waterproof'd encyclopaedia handed to them, they still have this make tools to make tools to make tools cycle that they can't even bootstrap.
The point is, putting that side to side with humans in some land animal bodies, you have on one hand a bunch of dolphin people who lost pretty much everything in a few generations, save for a few myths that are of no practical use, and on the other hand you have those land people with electricity, radio, and everything, a good chunk of 20th century tech.
Why on earth would they lose everything?
Yes, there would be some significant losses in the first few generations. But if you teleport the top 10 000 scientist and engineers onto an alien world with no human artifacts and leave them in human bodies, there will also be some significant losses in the first few generations. Once data storage technology is able to keep up with the volume of knowledge retained, then the losses will stop, and knowledge will slowly start to be regained.
If they're sensible, they'll realise that they can't retain everything, and put some effort into retaining that which is important.
Why not? Hydraulic cement will harden underwater, and can be carefully pressed and moulded into shape. And while I have no idea how dolphins can get to that point, apparently even underwater welding is possible.
'cause nothing they know is particularly useful for future generations. You just get distorted myths, and it doesn't take much distortion until technical knowledge becomes entirely non trustworthy and thus worthless.
But can you make hydraulic cement underwater? I was under the impression that you needed fire to make it.
Knowing how to make hydraulic cement isn't useful?
I am quite certain that the 10 000 top engineers and scientists know quite a few things that would be very useful for future generations. Since I am not in that number, and since I am only one person, I do not know what those things would be, but I estimate a high probability that they exist.
I'm not sure. The Wikipedia article mentions that the ancient Romans used a mixture of volcanic ash and crushed lime, and you certainly do get underwater volcanoes, so the ash should be available... there are probably industrial processes now, but just mixing volcanic ash with the right sort of mud and getting something that hardens if you leave it for a day or two sounds usable underwater to me.
No, the ash would react with water immeadetly and thus be useless and you need burned lime (CaO or (CaOH)2), not limestone (CaCO3)
Ah, thank you. I wasn't sure about that.
But it's not enough to convey the formulas, you need also to convey the context. And you need to do so reliably, without later generations adding in nonsense of their own. When the knowledge is in use, it's naturally checked against reality and protected against decay.
re: cement, my understanding is that you still need to fire components to make hydraulic cement, and underwater ash won't work.
Which means that they will best remember things that they can immediately put to use, yes. Such as how to breed fish for desired characteristics, maybe? Or how to create some basic tools.
But what those tools may be, besides the tools real dolphins already invented? And breeding fish requires some sort of enclosure, ability to manipulate individual fish, etc. It's not even clear there's anything to gain from breeding fish if you don't do some underwater agriculture for fish food (and thus need fish very different from available species to make full use of that).
Perhaps the reasons dolphin's large brains are not particularly optimized (comparing to ours) in terms of neural density, despite ample time at their brain volume, is that they already do pretty much everything that a greater intellect would do.
On the ground and with the hands, when our intelligence was the same as of dolphins, we had a lot of complex and useful things we could have been doing if we were a little smarter, and that's how we evolved our intelligence (and conversely, how they didn't evolve much further).