Conworld random thread

[WeepingElf]

Point taken.

[keenir]

Does anyone think there is a way for an alien that evolves to live in an aquatic (and only aquatic) environment to develop a technological civilization?

Yes - the proverbial "sticks and stones" are always good, both on land and in water. ditto bones, shells, terraces/cannal-building.

How would a species that can't make fire develop advanced technology?

Well, you can't make fire underwater (though scientists such as Hand suggest that black smokers, serpentization, (and ?) can sidestep fire)

...though, can these aquatic aliens stick part or all of themselves out of the water? (not neccessarily like mudskippers - think of the octopi who crawl across rocks from one tidepool to another to ambush prey)

[Travis B.]

...though, can these aquatic aliens stick part or all of themselves out of the water? (not neccessarily like mudskippers - think of the octopi who crawl across rocks from one tidepool to another to ambush prey)

If octopi achieved sentience, I would bet that they would become tool-using myself.

[Moose-tache]

I would phrase it like this: assuming a species that cannot survive unassisted out of the water for more than a minute or two, would they be able to make spaceships? We'll give them the best possible odds: large, shallow seas with mineral-rich continental shelves, light gravity, oxygen-abundant atmosphere.

[keenir]

I would phrase it like this: assuming a species that cannot survive unassisted out of the water for more than a minute or two, would they be able to make spaceships? We'll give them the best possible odds: large, shallow seas with mineral-rich continental shelves, light gravity, oxygen-abundant atmosphere.

To make them...probably not (unless they go heavily into making modules that can be assembled into one)

...but thats for while they're in a gravity well; once they're in orbit or beyond, I can see them almost being preadapted for weightless construction work..

It would certainly be easier for another species to loan them shuttles and rockets to get into and out of their atmosphere.

[jal]

What are you defining as "advanced technology"? Certainly their development of technology would be different from ours, but whether or not they would develop "advanced" technology depends on what that means.

I think that we agree that any technology would need tool use. To make tools, you need to be able to exert force to raw materials, which is difficult to do under water because of the viscosity of water.

Fire, on the other hand, doesn't seem too big of a problem: underwater volcanos could supply enough heat to melt ore, for example, even though keeping it liquid long enough to pour into a mold might be tricky. But I don't see an underwater blacksmith, because of the previous mentioned constraints.


JAL

[Xhin]

Couldn't they use wetsuits to do things outside of their aquatic environment? Like as humans we need oxygen and air pressure and can therefore do things outside our natural environments if we have suits that allow us to maintain our preferred environment. Similarly, aquatic species might be able to make suits that allow them to maintain their liquid environments while being able to do things on land or in space.

The hardest challenge would be the materials science needed to create suits that don't leak water and can circulate oxygen/etc properly in environments without natural buoyancy. These would also need to support a variety of natural movements, which could be excessively hard if the creatures in question were invertebrates. Maybe some type of gel would work better -- would support movement and provide more structure than water would, at the cost of difficulty in diffusing oxygen through the substrate. Gels and even mucouses however are excellent ways of maintaining necessary moisture out of the water-- see: slugs and amphibians.

Processing metal would be extraordinarily difficult, and metal Is most likely a requirement for further material refinement, particularly in its ability to hold non-aquatic environments like air-rich environments or vacuum. Furthermore, a species that's able to walk on land isn't immediately going to know to process terrestrial metal because they don't have thousands of years informing that thought process. So some kind of aquatic metal processing is essential to their tech tree.

[Raphael]

Similarly, aquatic species might be able to make suits that allow them to maintain their liquid environments while being able to do things on land or in space.

Or in underwater air-filled chambers, similar to our vacuum chambers.

[Xhin]

What are you defining as "advanced technology"? Certainly their development of technology would be different from ours, but whether or not they would develop "advanced" technology depends on what that means.

I think that we agree that any technology would need tool use. To make tools, you need to be able to exert force to raw materials, which is difficult to do under water because of the viscosity of water.

Various shrimp like the mantis shrimp are able to exert extremely high levels of force on objects without tool use. I could see a kind of tech tree that uses biological force to create mechanisms that act in a similar way or even just enhance or distribute the force produced through biological means. This would be a very different tech tree than what we're used to -- it would be based on explosive local force and precise cutting rather than repeated imprecise cutting or smashing. I could see their industry equivalents of this being far faster at making shapes than human industry.

Heat-resistant cutting tools of this kind would be able to form metals in malleable states to highly precise shapes by virtue of just completely cleaving through it with high psi, even in an underwater environment.

[Man in Space]

How might a situation arise where a language in antiquity can have two concurrent (and largely unrelated) writing systems in widespread use? I have both cuneiform and hieroglyphic modes for CT and I like them both a bit too much to get rid of them, so I’d like to maybe work in a historical quirk where some communities used one and some used the other. I can think of some ideas but they strike me as either implausible on their face or implausible in light of certain in-world historical considerations.

[bradrn]

How might a situation arise where a language in antiquity can have two concurrent (and largely unrelated) writing systems in widespread use? I have both cuneiform and hieroglyphic modes for CT and I like them both a bit too much to get rid of them, so I’d like to maybe work in a historical quirk where some communities used one and some used the other. I can think of some ideas but they strike me as either implausible on their face or implausible in light of certain in-world historical considerations.

Consider hieroglyphs/hieratic/demotic, or hanja/hangeul, or Serbian Latin/Cyrillic…

[keenir]

How might a situation arise where a language in antiquity can have two concurrent (and largely unrelated) writing systems in widespread use? I have both cuneiform and hieroglyphic modes for CT and I like them both a bit too much to get rid of them, so I’d like to maybe work in a historical quirk where some communities used one and some used the other. I can think of some ideas but they strike me as either implausible on their face or implausible in light of certain in-world historical considerations.

One of my first thoughts was "Roman & Chinese scripts to write Mandarin"...but then I noticed you'd said in antiquity...well, the Hittites and Pharoahs both had their own hieroglyphic systems, but they also sent letters to each other in Sumerian/Akkadian cuneiform, depending on the century. So maybe the quirk is "how far away are they writing to?" or "how worldly does the writer wish to appear?"

...or anyone who could read both the Pali canon of Buddhism and a Chinese script

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Are you speaking of the Antiquity of Earth, or simply a significantly analogous setting?

[Man in Space]

Thank you, everyone!

Are you speaking of the Antiquity of Earth, or simply a significantly analogous setting?

The latter.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Are you speaking of the Antiquity of Earth, or simply a significantly analogous setting?

The latter.

Then I would say it's fairly easy if there's a sociocultural or practical reason for these two writing systems. Usually, one will be more prestigious than the other: Kanji were more prestigious than hiragana (used, I understand, initially very often by women, archaically being called 女手 onnade "women's hand" — the reading in Lady Murasaki's time was probably closer to wominate or wominade), and for some time Katakana were more often used by men (the use of katakana where you would expect Hiragana now persisted in some areas until the postwar orthographic reforms; the text of the Meiji Constitution is written in Kanji and katakana), though Kanji-hiragana text had become normalised in daily usage long before (the text of Wagahai wa Neko de Aru looks roughly like modern Japanese, though the standard Tokyo dialect now uses many different grammatical forms than the ones you would encounter in literature from the period). Hangul were also seen as less-prestigious than Hanja, though I know less about their history. These were a bit later than antiquity, but any system reliant on foreign ideographs superposed onto a heavily-inflecting language will probably develop some method of writing sounds that aren't part of the content of a word.

The development of cursive forms of writing could function somewhat like what you're describing, too, especially if cursive ligatures eventually ended up producing a syllabary where print writing was still alphabetic or somesuch.

[jal]

How might a situation arise where a language in antiquity can have two concurrent (and largely unrelated) writing systems in widespread use?

A shared language but two different empires? Like if Turkey wouldn't have been fully "liberated", so you'd have one half where Atatürk introduced Latin writing, and one half still using Ottoman Arabic? Or a people that pre-litteracy have been conquered by two different empires, each with their own writing system?

Alternatively, it could be simply a geographic difference. So e.g. the North borders country A with writing system A and trades a lot A, while the south borders country B and trades a lot with B. Or a religious difference: there's two major religions, each religions writing in the script of their holy book (the latter is real world: Hindi vs. Urdu and Kroatian vs. Serbian, for example).


JAL

[Man in Space]

Thank you all!

[bradrn]

Another example I just remembered: Malaysia uses both Rumi (Latin) and Jawi (Arabic) scripts for Malay.

[Richard W]

How might a situation arise where a language in antiquity can have two concurrent (and largely unrelated) writing systems in widespread use?

Luwian is an example from antiquity - Mesopotamian cuneiform and their own hieroglyphs.

[Raholeun]

Would you guys know of some resources that would help with establishing the details of a conreligion? Something that would could serve me like the Describing Morphosyntax when fleshing out the spiritual culture of a confolk?