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userulluipeste 15 hours ago [-]
"Other scientists agree that some amount of water could have formed on Earth — but perhaps not nearly enough to produce its oceans." "Earth might have been a water factory for only a moment, but that moment may have been enough to forge oceans."
Well, our planet has magnetosphere and it also had life for a long time already. Although the magnetosphere reduces the influx of Hydrogen in form of solar wind proton bombardment, it also prevents the loss of Hydrogen that managed to get captured on Earth by not letting it be blown away from the upper layers of atmosphere. Life at one point, almost two and a half billion years ago, caused the Great Oxygenation Event, in which the entire atmosphere got Oxygen rich. This very special atmosphere (for all that time) made it possible for the incoming Hydrogen (be it from the Sun, other stars, or just as the most common form of dust in the universe blown in here from whatever direction and cause) to ultimately be collected as water. Two and a half billion years, that's a lot of time to accrue water. It ought to show, at some point. So it's at least one pair of factors that could have led to a surplus of water we see today, besides what might have existed from very beginning.
chistev 6 hours ago [-]
> Well, our planet has magnetosphere and it also had life for a long time already.
But life needed water as a requirement to arrive, right? So are you saying that there was a little bit of water for life to get started, before that same life caused the oxygenation event to create more water over millions of years?
Please explain, thank you.
rrgok 4 hours ago [-]
Is this a chicken and egg like question?
thangalin 21 hours ago [-]
My Impacts project depicts a scene from the prolonged bombardment, a time when Earth was cratered by asteroids and comets:
So the theory explained here is that Hydrogen mixed with the Oxygen in the melted rock (magma) of earth, under extremely high pressure to create our earth specific flavor of H2O (appropriate amount of trace minerals and deuterium).
Correct, and we can demonstrate this via various gem-bearing and REE-bearing pegmatites which almost universally contain magmatic-sourced water trapped within them.
cmrdporcupine 17 hours ago [-]
Could this have happened under the pressure of the interplanetary collision with the protoplanet "Theia" that led to the creation of the moon?
oneneptune 21 hours ago [-]
Wow what an awesome art piece by Ada Zejun Shen that they commissioned(?) for this article!
I have little artistic ability myself, but I am continuously in awe of what artists create. It makes me hope for the optimistic outlook of AI where UBI frees people to pursue creative and intellectual pursuits, rather than constantly trying to push a stock price uphill.
iknowstuff 20 hours ago [-]
I thought it was ai generated lol
dylan604 20 hours ago [-]
even when websites provide attribution for images, people don't read them
kbelder 14 hours ago [-]
I've read Europa has more water than Earth. Is the idea that it accumulated its water through an entirely different means? Or that it formed with its water, and didn't lose it during the initial coalescence, like the Earth did?
This is one of those areas where I don't know enough to oppose the scientists that are experts in this domain, and so I know I should accept the general consensus... but there's still a niggling doubt in my mind because it just doesn't feel right.
jdw64 21 hours ago [-]
Life began in the Ocean, but why did civilization begin on land? Is it because of fire? But I wonder if a different kind of civilization could have emerged
vitally3643 21 hours ago [-]
That's one theory, yes. Cooking food (with fire) makes more calories available, meaning less hunting required to support more individuals, and/or freeing up more time and calories for thinking. This allowed us to evolve bigger and more complex brains.
While it's not a given that fire is a hard prerequisite for an industrial civilization, it certainly accelerated our technological development. Fact of the matter is, we know of exactly one civilization, which is not enough to draw any conclusions. There's no real reason we know of that aquatic species cannot evolve into a technological civilization, we just haven't seen it happen. Fact is we don't really know how an intelligent technological species evolves. We only have guesses from our own history.
aurareturn 20 hours ago [-]
Fire, agriculture, electricity, AI.
Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.
vitally3643 19 hours ago [-]
That's the fun thing, since we have only observed a single advanced civilization, and that one only indirectly through archaeological evidence, there's no hard facts to be had! We can only make guesses. We don't know what is and is not required to make an advanced technological species, and we won't have any answers until we meet another one to compare with.
anonymousiam 19 hours ago [-]
It looks like you've already done so with the order of the sequence that you used.
dyauspitr 14 hours ago [-]
AI hasn’t taken its final form yet.
cmrdporcupine 19 hours ago [-]
Arguably they're all fire -- requiring/involving forms of combustion.
(Well, debatable about agriculture, slash'n'burn wasn't the only form of it, but it was common for land clearing at least... all we have now is one that involves combustion engines, though...)
vkou 19 hours ago [-]
Nuclear weapons and the control structure around their use and fossil fuels and the C-corporation and what it optimizes for will probably turn out to be more important to the long-term future of humanity and it's civilization.
vitally3643 19 hours ago [-]
Fossil fuels are another feature like fire. One of the leading theories is that the availability of extremely energy dense fuels is one of the primary reason we were able to industrialize, and that without those fuels industrialization would be vastly more difficult if not impossible.
Personally I disagree with 'impossible', but it would definitely be harder. There's a pretty good argument to be made for leaving significant quantities of fossil fuels in the ground for the next civilization. If we wipe ourselves out, whoever comes next is going to very badly need those fuels to rebuild an industrial base.
cmrdporcupine 19 hours ago [-]
There were copper & bronze age industrial sites. Esp Tin & arsenic bronze smelting sites. Complete with child labour, open pit mines, assembly line style processing, and heavy metal poisoning. E.g. Semiyarka, in present day Kazakhstan, ~1600 BCE. You can still see the environmental damage to this day from the air.
Romans had industrial processes, too, for things like fabric / laundry cleaning.
What's new in the 18th/19th century is full-on mechanization of industry. And the wage labour system to make it possible. Accompanied by acts of enclosure etc to drive the peasantry off the land and into factories. Also the mechanization of agriculture that went with that.
aozame 19 hours ago [-]
AI is not important at all. Just make things more convenient, but is completely unnecessary.
bdamm 17 hours ago [-]
Check back in 5 years. This is going to age poorly.
The reason is that, despite what many think, AI actually is able to create novel ideas and solutions. That's why AlphaGo was so important; it couldn't beat the world's best Go player just be being a fancy autocomplete and a big processor. It had to create new discoveries and then use them effectively. That was the turning point. It's been a decade of improvements since then, and AI is already making discoveries we couldn't have made without it. The impacts are already here and in your world, you just haven't recognized them as such yet. But in a few years it will be undeniable to even the most uneducated observer, since changes that could not be possible will be present in every person's life as the effects ripple out across basically every industry.
stasomatic 16 hours ago [-]
I am a bit skeptical but cautiously optimistic about AI “creating novel ideas”, if we are using “create” pedantically. Any interesting examples?
rogerrogerr 15 hours ago [-]
Those math proofs from a few weeks back seem plausible.
artisin 16 hours ago [-]
In no timeline nor carbon-based universe does GP's comment age poorly.
smilespray 20 hours ago [-]
And a sample size of one.
vitally3643 20 hours ago [-]
That's what I said, yes.
nobodyandproud 20 hours ago [-]
We have counter examples of human pods that never really achieved “civilization”.
What’s missing that make them more akin to orcas or wolves?
greiskul 19 hours ago [-]
It is possible it is just time. Modern humans are considered to have existed for 300k~ years. Civilizations are about 6k years old.
So who knows. Maybe if you gave them an extra 10k years, they would have achived "civilization". It is not much for the scale of human existance. But it is longer than any of our civilizations has existed for.
nobodyandproud 18 hours ago [-]
For humans, I wonder if population size and density is also a factor.
That is, if there’s a critical mass and population size.
asdff 18 hours ago [-]
And makes sense with agriculture and civilization coming together. Agriculture improved the carrying capacity of an acre of land dramatically from what it was from foraging and hunting.
HarHarVeryFunny 17 hours ago [-]
Written language ?
Got it too easy ?
Calavar 20 hours ago [-]
Brains are resource hungry, especially oxygen hungry. Earth's air is orders of magnitude richer in oxygen molecules than its water. This likely made it easier for intelligence to develop on land. It's worth noting that the smartest aquatic animals are air breathing mammals that spent much of their evolutionary history on land before returning to water.
onlypassingthru 20 hours ago [-]
When did octopuses start breathing air?
Calavar 20 hours ago [-]
Octopuses are smart, but I've yet to see anything that suggests they are smarter than dolphins or whales.
mapt 20 hours ago [-]
Both whales and prairie dogs turn out to have rather advanced degrees of verbal language capability, more complex than any of the Great Apes bar homo sapiens. Crows somehow culturally remember the face of an antagonist multiple generations later. Almost every highly social vertebrate has degrees of intelligence that would get you burned as a witch if you'd suggested it not too long ago, in the era when "Fishes clearly don't feel pain" was just a cultural default assumption.
onlypassingthru 19 hours ago [-]
I've heard that the biggest limiting factor in octopus ocean domination is their short lifespans. Tool use, building structures, communication, facial recognition, multiple brains, it's all there.
Interesting to think what could be if cephalopods raised their young instead of leaving them to completely fend for themselves. It would start intergenerational knowledge transfer, i.e. culture. Maybe selection pressure then trends towards group cooperation instead of going it solo.
I still think there would be huge barriers to "civilization" as I think you mean? (Do any of the apes have "civilization"?).
fhdkweig 19 hours ago [-]
The real problem with cephalopods is their lifespan. For their age, they are almost as smart as humans, the problem is that they don't live past the age of 5 years.
ekelsen 17 hours ago [-]
I would argue that not having any overlap between generations is a bigger problem. It guarantees no accumulation of knowledge.
fhdkweig 17 hours ago [-]
Agreed. If they were social enough to form large communities of unrelated families, it would also fix the generation overlap. But they don't do that either. They seem to be in a weird evolutionary dead end for intelligence.
sarkhan 20 hours ago [-]
Orcas do this already.
I mean there might be a already a civilization that is in the building that will peak 100k years later, and we just don't know about it.
ekelsen 20 hours ago [-]
having arms is probably an advantage in developing tool-use, but who knows!
zahlman 20 hours ago [-]
Physically manipulating objects is a lot harder underwater, even if you somehow evolve fine motor control despite not having any real use for it. So that severely limits what an intelligent aquatic species could actually do with that intelligence. Aside from fire you're missing the wheel, a writing system and many other things.
card_zero 20 hours ago [-]
Being immersed in solvent can't help with things like graphic arts and pottery.
TheBigSalad 20 hours ago [-]
You're talking about a thing that happened for 1 species for such a small period of Earth's history to be just a blip. There's not enough data to draw a conclusion here.
layer8 19 hours ago [-]
One hypothesis is that the brain began too look (and eventually plan) farther ahead with land animals, because you have a much farther view in air than in water. On land there is more evolutionary pressure to change one’s behavior regarding animals farther away that you see and that can see you, to predict their behavior and plan one’s own behavior within a larger time horizon.
stasomatic 15 hours ago [-]
Can’t answer that, nobody will likely to be able to ever, outside religions. We are NBKs. How that happened, idk, some cosmic curse. Dolphins didn’t develop atlatals, broad heads, catapults, napalm, and F35s.
HarHarVeryFunny 18 hours ago [-]
1) Land has more diverse and rapidly changing environments, creating generalists, creating advanced intelligence
2) Civilization requires hands, but in water fins and flippers are more useful
3) Sure, it could have worked out differently, but here we are
yieldcrv 10 hours ago [-]
> but why did civilization begin on land?
Octopus have civilization, despite the usual solo trip, group behavior has been observed, small neighborhoods of octopi staying within their shells and occasionally pestering each other.
Some aquatic mammals have civilization as well.
A lot of what's going on just hasn't been observed well
nobodyandproud 20 hours ago [-]
Humans are one of a handful species equipped to change their immediate environment to suit their needs, across virtually every environment, and introduce stability.
Beyond that…
Being able to have down time seems like a prerequisite to creating. civilization.
Also, having both the intelligence and desire to seem and recognize ways to improve—even if not strictly necessary—via tools to free up even more time also seems to be a requirement.
And having a system to reliably and in-scale transmit this knowledge is the final ingredient.
So some baseline stability, down-time,
intelligence, reliable knowledge transmission, tool-use for the above, and active willingness to improve all of the above all seem like necessary ingredients.
module1973 19 hours ago [-]
Earth made water.. right.. and a big explosion made the earth? How stupid do you think we all are?
petermcneeley 18 hours ago [-]
They have played us all for absolute fools!
18 hours ago [-]
fragmede 15 hours ago [-]
How could the Earth be round? All the water would fall right off!
hofo 12 hours ago [-]
As opposed to what, a gift from aliens?
escape_42 16 hours ago [-]
i imagine this is what happens when a giant iceball starts to melt
ck2 19 hours ago [-]
Maybe some of Earth's oceans came from its rings collapsing (not kidding)
Earth inherited water, released it, and retained it, while the atmosphere and oceans formed together as a coupled system. Heating released water via volcanism. Outgassing formed an atmosphere rich in water vapor. Cooling caused condensation and rainfall. Oceans stabilized.
Oxygen accumulated only after oceans already existed for over a billion years.
doublerabbit 19 hours ago [-]
200 years from now on HN.
"Where Did Earth Get Its Deserts? Maybe It's Ai, Datacentres and Climate Change"
Well, our planet has magnetosphere and it also had life for a long time already. Although the magnetosphere reduces the influx of Hydrogen in form of solar wind proton bombardment, it also prevents the loss of Hydrogen that managed to get captured on Earth by not letting it be blown away from the upper layers of atmosphere. Life at one point, almost two and a half billion years ago, caused the Great Oxygenation Event, in which the entire atmosphere got Oxygen rich. This very special atmosphere (for all that time) made it possible for the incoming Hydrogen (be it from the Sun, other stars, or just as the most common form of dust in the universe blown in here from whatever direction and cause) to ultimately be collected as water. Two and a half billion years, that's a lot of time to accrue water. It ought to show, at some point. So it's at least one pair of factors that could have led to a surplus of water we see today, besides what might have existed from very beginning.
But life needed water as a requirement to arrive, right? So are you saying that there was a little bit of water for life to get started, before that same life caused the oxygenation event to create more water over millions of years?
Please explain, thank you.
* https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf#page=9
* https://impacts.to/bibliography.pdf
Am I reading that correctly?
Link to the paper mentioned in the article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09630-7
I have little artistic ability myself, but I am continuously in awe of what artists create. It makes me hope for the optimistic outlook of AI where UBI frees people to pursue creative and intellectual pursuits, rather than constantly trying to push a stock price uphill.
This is one of those areas where I don't know enough to oppose the scientists that are experts in this domain, and so I know I should accept the general consensus... but there's still a niggling doubt in my mind because it just doesn't feel right.
While it's not a given that fire is a hard prerequisite for an industrial civilization, it certainly accelerated our technological development. Fact of the matter is, we know of exactly one civilization, which is not enough to draw any conclusions. There's no real reason we know of that aquatic species cannot evolve into a technological civilization, we just haven't seen it happen. Fact is we don't really know how an intelligent technological species evolves. We only have guesses from our own history.
Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.
(Well, debatable about agriculture, slash'n'burn wasn't the only form of it, but it was common for land clearing at least... all we have now is one that involves combustion engines, though...)
Personally I disagree with 'impossible', but it would definitely be harder. There's a pretty good argument to be made for leaving significant quantities of fossil fuels in the ground for the next civilization. If we wipe ourselves out, whoever comes next is going to very badly need those fuels to rebuild an industrial base.
Romans had industrial processes, too, for things like fabric / laundry cleaning.
What's new in the 18th/19th century is full-on mechanization of industry. And the wage labour system to make it possible. Accompanied by acts of enclosure etc to drive the peasantry off the land and into factories. Also the mechanization of agriculture that went with that.
The reason is that, despite what many think, AI actually is able to create novel ideas and solutions. That's why AlphaGo was so important; it couldn't beat the world's best Go player just be being a fancy autocomplete and a big processor. It had to create new discoveries and then use them effectively. That was the turning point. It's been a decade of improvements since then, and AI is already making discoveries we couldn't have made without it. The impacts are already here and in your world, you just haven't recognized them as such yet. But in a few years it will be undeniable to even the most uneducated observer, since changes that could not be possible will be present in every person's life as the effects ripple out across basically every industry.
What’s missing that make them more akin to orcas or wolves?
So who knows. Maybe if you gave them an extra 10k years, they would have achived "civilization". It is not much for the scale of human existance. But it is longer than any of our civilizations has existed for.
That is, if there’s a critical mass and population size.
Got it too easy ?
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/octopuses-keep-surprising-us-...
I still think there would be huge barriers to "civilization" as I think you mean? (Do any of the apes have "civilization"?).
I mean there might be a already a civilization that is in the building that will peak 100k years later, and we just don't know about it.
2) Civilization requires hands, but in water fins and flippers are more useful
3) Sure, it could have worked out differently, but here we are
Octopus have civilization, despite the usual solo trip, group behavior has been observed, small neighborhoods of octopi staying within their shells and occasionally pestering each other.
Some aquatic mammals have civilization as well.
A lot of what's going on just hasn't been observed well
Beyond that…
Being able to have down time seems like a prerequisite to creating. civilization.
Also, having both the intelligence and desire to seem and recognize ways to improve—even if not strictly necessary—via tools to free up even more time also seems to be a requirement.
And having a system to reliably and in-scale transmit this knowledge is the final ingredient.
So some baseline stability, down-time, intelligence, reliable knowledge transmission, tool-use for the above, and active willingness to improve all of the above all seem like necessary ingredients.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPhwhq-f1Uo
Oxygen accumulated only after oceans already existed for over a billion years.
"Where Did Earth Get Its Deserts? Maybe It's Ai, Datacentres and Climate Change"