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AshwinV 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.
Not necessarily. For reasons that are completely intuitive, I imagine our top 10 000 scientist et al. would be able to fashion tools, that could be used very effectively.
You make the assumption (albeit loosely) that progress happens along a straight pre-determined path, where things happen in a specific sequence, much like they did in human history. This is far from so. We are talking about a different planet out here. I'm not suggesting that different laws of physics will be applicable.
But the odds are that the oceanography, will be vastly different, with all sorts of different materials that would be available. There's no guarantee that this planet (from here on called "Dolphin Alpha") that steel would even exist or the necessary elements are present on the planet. On the other hand, you could possibly have all manner of other material. Perhaps, under water civilization would have a very different set of social rules.
HEAVY USE OF HYPERBOLE FOLLOWS
Given that these are the most brilliant 10 000 scientists that are present on the planet, I'd expect a sizeable number of them to know morse code, which can then be replicated in dolphin sounds (am no expert, but you'd need only two distinguishable sounds if I've got the concept correct). A good number more would be experts in Game theory. The homo sapiens dolphinus (again no expert, but this sounds authentic enough to me! How about we call them HSD for short?) that happen to know both morse code and be well versed in the more salient features of Game Theory, would probably rise to political power within the ranks of the HSD, and since these arent politicians who are in it for material gain (that part comes much later in the advent of a civilisation) and are truly interested in the welfare of the civilisation, would probably find ways to domesticate (or if you prefer the harsher equivalent "enslave"), all sorts of smaller creatures that could work for them!!
For the sake of simplicity, if we assume that marine life on Dolhin Alpha evolved roughly in parallel with that of Earth, the Dolphin Alpha Crabs (resembling the ones that live under water not the other type) and Dolphin Alpha Lobsters could work like minions. The HSD could decipher which fish are poisonous and use that knowledge to hunt larger and more meatier underwater species (I was thinking sharks, but that takes experimentation and I somehow see the world's leading scientists thinking long and hard and then deciding that there are safer options at hand, except for the few who were also born adrenaline junkies and are now flapping their fins in excitement)
Before I get further carried away, I would just like to say that the body shape is something that can be easily overcome.
Whether intelligence would arise to a greater degree, really is a matter up for debate, but I would b inclined to think the answer is no, until the HSD discovers the equivalent of computing.
I have your 'domesticate other animals' listed in a footnote. Would take a long time and getting the domesticated animals to the point where they're a replacement for your hands... that's on par with a breeding program to regrow your own hands.
The time during which you can make environment easy enough that your intelligence de-evolves.