The Human Minority?

[Steve Games]

Are humans a minority among the intelligent populations of Earth?

 

There are, roughly, 7 billion moderately intelligent human beings on Earth. There are 8 billion intelligent Horizos in the sea. Ten billion intelligent Vertics as well. And 25,748,583,684 very intelligent tangleshocks.

 

http://www.tangleshock.wordpress.com

 

A variety of immediate concerns revolve around technology, environmental stimulants for evolution, energy sources and such: how would an undersea world support a civilized society?

 

I believe that these issues can be realistically addressed. Because we know so little about such a vast area - the oceans hold 300 times the living space of the surface world - there remains much to be discovered.

 

 

[lemur]

This reminds me of a thought I had about constructing gills for people to breath under water. I think I'll go google what makes gills able to absorb oxygen dissolved in water. Still, even if humans could surgically create gills for themselves, how would their skin take the salinity, wetness, and temperature? Maybe there needs to be some serious genetic syntheses with aquatic mammal genes to create undersea humans. Sea monkeys?

 

edit: nevermind. I just read that water only contains 1/20 the amount of oxygen that air does (per unit volume?). I guess this explains why warm-blooded animals, even aquatic ones, require lungs. Oh well, we can still synthesize with dolphin/whale genes to create aquatic humans. They'll just have blow-holes instead of gills.

Edited December 17, 2010 by lemur

[Mr Skeptic]

Well gills have a lot of problems, enough so that perhaps it's better to stick with air like the dolphins and whales. If you had gills, you'd have massive heat loss to the water, there's far less oxygen in the water than in the air, and you'd lose water to the higher salinity salt water via osmosis. Perhaps these problems could be overcome, but even so you'd probably need a much larger heart. Look up the tuna's circulatory system to see what troubles a huge fish goes through to be even partially warm-blooded and breathe via gills.

[Steve Games]

I see the undersea intelligences as having cold-blooded systems with two hearts, like fish, and a skin closer to that of a shark than human flesh. They would have some gas-based organs that would be depth sensitive and unable to survive the lighter pressures of the shallow seas inhabited by submarines and scuba divers. In fact, they would know nothing of the surface world at all until technologically advanced enough to explore it.

[Mr Skeptic]

Fish only have one, two-chambered heart. They can get away with that because they're cold-blooded, so need less oxygen, and in water so there's no huge pressure differences between head and legs. We mammals have a four-chambered heart providing for essentially separate circulation in the lungs and body. But cold-blooded is a good choice for aquatic creatures, otherwise making them huge would help reduce the problem of heat loss.

 

As for technology, a lot of our tech requires heating/fire, electrical conductivity, plus seawater is corrosive to many materials, and on top of that seawater will block radiowaves. A lot of our type of tech just wouldn't work very well in the oceans and that's knowing how it works to start with. If aquatic creatures have tech, perhaps it would be more like biotech, or something else very different from ours.