How could an aquatic alien race develop a technologically advanced civilization?

There are multiple aquatic aliens in fiction and I want to hear your ideas on how such a species could achieve an advanced society.

There are two common handwaves I have seen. They are somehow uplifted by another advanced species or their life cycle includes a land-dwelling or amphibious phase.

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I'm talking more about a totally aquatic species, one that can't leave the water, at least not without technological aid.

Have you checked out Organic Technology for ideas?

"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."

I'm going to set aside the idea of organic technology that lets them make buildings and machines and such, as that's basically fantasy as far as our understanding of things goes.

The basic problem with such a species is that they cannot naturally discover combustion, at least not under ordinary conditions. If they cannot do this, then they cannot work with metals, and there goes any hope of advanced technology. I'd offer that electricity is also going to be a hard sell, as water, particularly ocean water, is too good a conductor of electricity to let primitive devices work.

There'd be no alien Ben Franklin hoisting a kite into a thunderstorm, no tribesman bringing a wooden stick struck by lightning back to his cave to illuminate the darkness and cook food. It's also difficult to see how the wheel might be developed, as there would be no need to transport things by ground. So the most fundamental parts of technology as we understand it would simply not occur.

It gets even less likely if this aquatic civilization is to become spacefaring, since they'd have no impetus to develop flight, a necessary precursor. Hell, if most of them live more than a few dozen meters below the surface, they'd never see stars and have virtually no understanding of the sun — no reason to surmise that they live on a planet that is a part of a solar system, and so on.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 25th 2018 at 10:25:07 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Hm, here's a question: Could such a species use volcanic vents or the like to do metal working?

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Unless they can withstand intense heat I don't think they'd be able to without being boiled alive.

Would cultivating coral be a viable option?

Without the ability to develop glassworking as a technology, there's no way they could create microscopes, and thus microbiology and genetics would be impossible to discover. So they'd be left with macroscopic genetics, i.e. husbandry, to train their coral species to build stuff. I mean, sure, if you're really going for a fantasy feel, you can give it a shot, but coral isn't going to make machinery, just fixed structures and maybe melee weapons.

There's no way they'd ever get out of the underwater equivalent of the Stone Age. The Bronze Age would be forever beyond them.

I'm not an expert on metalworking, but my understanding is that cooling forged metals too rapidly causes them to become brittle, so how they'd get anything usable out of such a process is beyond me. Also, they'd either need to work with the volcanic material coming out of the vents, which is nothing like pure metal (mainly minerals and salts), or mine metal (somehow) and bring it to the vents.

As far as we know, early humans discovered metalworking because some of the rocks they used to line their campfires contained malleable metals like copper, which melted under the heat. No such process would be available to an underwater species.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 26th 2018 at 2:18:03 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Another issue to consider, if they do manage to reach industrialization then pollution would be a major problem since if they're anything like earth marine life then they'd be especially susceptible to industrial waste and other such things that currently plague our oceans.

Edited by Kaiseror on Aug 26th 2018 at 11:06:40 AM

Not on Earth, no, but you didn't specify Earth. There are substances that readily burn underwater (for example, magnesium), so if this is taking place on another planet, you just need a setting in which there are readily available supplies of such substances.

And a source of ignition. That still doesn't provide a path to metallurgy, though. Magnesium fires aren't something you can sustain without a lot of the stuff, and you can't cook things or smelt metal with them particularly easily. I mean, sure, if you had a bunch of ore-bearing rocks and burned magnesium on them, you might get liquid metal, but what then? You're underwater.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 27th 2018 at 11:23:08 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Im not an expert in this, but my understanding is that to reduce melted ore to pure metal requires that the impurities are extracted by exposure to high heat in an environment that absorbes the extra elements. For example, copper ore apparently contains oxygen, so the method is to use a high intensity kiln and feed oxygen poor air into it (the carbon monoxide rich smoke from a fire works). This is how our stone age ancestors did it.

Now, reproducing that underwater on Earth might be impossible. But on another planet there might be regions of liquid with different chemical properties, such that they could be used as a reducing agent for various metals. The author might have to play around with the chemistry a bit to find a process that would work. I dont want to invest the time or energy into doing the research, but my feeling is that someone with more motivation than I have could come up with a semi-plausible scenario.

If the species is near the coastline they could start making buoyant structures for the purposes of metal working.

They could, but its more challenging to try to come up with a way to do it underwater.

Purification of metals requires prolonged heating, not momentary heating. Even if you are processing native metal and especially processing ores. This is why the furnace is such a massive lynchpin in any civilization that makes it past lower end copper working. Native copper can be cold worked but that doesn't lead to other metallurgical advances on its own. The process of heating metal and ores to be worked does.

The basis of iron working relies on a lengthy and involved furnace step where iron ore is heated until it becomes malleable at least. Not necessarily liquid but malleable. The early iron techniques basically focused on heating up the ore and beating as much extraneous material out of it while hot and then reheating. Wash rinse repeat a few times. The result did remove some of the impurities but left both iron and steel made in this way laden with a fair bit of contamination.

Who watches the watchmen?

Iron might end up needing to be bypassed. Rust doesn't form a protective patina and iron will react with water or seawater without protection. Bluing might work but I don't think anyone would figure that technique out before abandoning iron.

Aluminum can't be refined with heat anyway so it's possible that an aquatic species might find a means of refining it.

Can you even find metal ore underwater?

I'm working on an aquatic race right now! One idea I'm exploring is to have them capable of organically generating high-intensity ultrasound with such precision, they can, with training, use it to manipulate a metal lattice at a molecular level and distort the bonds such that the oxides separate from the metals entirely. They can use the same process to diffuse additional elements into an alloy or turn the metal malleable for the forging process. As their civilisation developed, their metalworking spaces grew more and more sophisticated, basically becoming controlled underwater echo chambers designed to minimise turbid flow with a series of mechanisms to augment and fine-tune the acoustics.

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That's a really neat idea, to my mind! I don't know whether the physics works out or not (it's not a field that I have much knowledge of), but the concept is very interest, at the least. ^_^

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They would come up with some intersting weapon designs, for sure.

It's pure magic, but it is an interesting premise.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Well its both creative and answers the question. A+.

Bel: There is if they could either find a way to apply a bitumen coat and/or how to do one of the various forms of bluing.

Who watches the watchmen?

Well, when molecular vibration starts getting involved, you're leaving plain Newtonian mechanics behind and getting into discrete/quantum territory anyway, which as far as I'm concerned is pretty much magic :P I'm using a made-up metal with ambiguous crystal structure and chemical properties, since it's a fantasy setting and iron is out of question.

Come to think of it, do we really have to use metalworking as the main yardstick of technological advancement? Why not have, say, a race that gobble up mineral detritus and secrete it as a hard substance like pearl oysters? Or build all their stuff out of genetically-engineered phytoplankton and algae? I mean, to use a real-life analogue, Mesoamerican civilisations had fairly primitive metalworking by Old World standards, but managed to genetically engineer edible maize from wild, grass-like teosinte, alongside other domesticated species like squash and cassava.

Maybe I'm biased because I don't personally regard anything with aliens in it as hard sci-fi, but it's pretty constraining to define a fictional race's tech level purely by human standards.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Sep 1st 2018 at 6:08:29 AM

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Yes. Because metal working represents notable leaps in the capability of quite a few technologies from the most basic level to the most advanced. But even more importantly it represents the ability to create a means to more effectively manipulate and in the long run control an environment.

Until you realize the fact they need to be able to work the material beyond a mere excretion like an oyster to make it useful. Even if they exude or excrete pure homogenous rust-proof carbon steel in a neat small bar stock it isn't worth much until they can work it into tools. Ie metal working.

The Mesoamericans were making slow but steady progress in their metalworking and it showed in the impact on their civilization before that the extensive development of stone tools had a notable impact. They were in fact in their own form of a very early Bronze Age. The slow spread of bronze tech alone started to have a notable impact but they never got a chance to fully exploit the new technology before the Europeans came along. The basic domestication of early animals and plants is largely accidental and hardly a benchmark of technological advance. There are also hard limits on what you can achieve with both accidental discovery path that was early animal husbandry and plant domestication and even the long slow deliberate breeding. Again metal has a dramatic impact on both such as the impact of metal tools on farming alone and increasing capability to manipulate plants with increasingly specialized and sophisticated tools enabled by metal working.

It would be amazingly hard to argue against it given being able to work metals enables quite a few technologies across the board from the most simple to the most complex and is frankly unbelievable. Quite simply metals as a substance offer a significant number of advantages over pure natural sources.

Your aquatic species is a good example. They have an extraordinary ability that would enable them to make some of the greatest possible metal tools ever even at an early stage. It would give them a huge leg up in terms of survival and evolution and using the ability and tools together only furthers their capabilities. To put it into perspective what would likely be easier for them to work? A straight bar of processed iron ready for manipulation vs a hunk of ore with all the possible and variable impurities?

Who watches the watchmen?

Does this species need air to breathe? In the real world, the fact that water contains little oxygen is going to constrain any development of gill-dependent sentient species as sophisticated brains are an enormous oxygen consumer. Hence why only cold-blooded fish who don't need to keep their bodies warm are gill—breathing vertebrates while cetaceans have to rely on lungs.

If your species was or becomes air-breathing like whales and porpoises (or pertinently, lungfish) it might have exposure to both flying and fire.

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