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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself
hofo wrote 16 hours 45 min ago:
As opposed to what, a gift from aliens?
iJohnDoe wrote 16 hours 56 min ago:
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.
kbelder wrote 19 hours 18 min 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.
userulluipeste wrote 19 hours 46 min ago:
"Other scientists agree that some amount of water could have formed on
Earth â 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 wrote 11 hours 8 min 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 wrote 8 hours 27 min ago:
Is this a chicken and egg like question?
escape_42 wrote 21 hours 15 min ago:
i imagine this is what happens when a giant iceball starts to melt
module1973 wrote 23 hours 33 min ago:
Earth made water.. right.. and a big explosion made the earth? How
stupid do you think we all are?
fragmede wrote 19 hours 50 min ago:
How could the Earth be round? All the water would fall right off!
petermcneeley wrote 22 hours 45 min ago:
They have played us all for absolute fools!
doublerabbit wrote 1 day ago:
200 years from now on HN.
"Where Did Earth Get Its Deserts? Maybe It's Ai, Datacentres and
Climate Change"
ck2 wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe some of Earth's oceans came from its rings collapsing (not
kidding)
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPhwhq-f1Uo
martzy13 wrote 1 day ago:
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).
Am I reading that correctly?
Link to the paper mentioned in the article:
HTML [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09630-7
lightedman wrote 23 hours 19 min ago:
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 wrote 21 hours 45 min 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 wrote 1 day ago:
Wow what an awesome art piece by Ada Zejun Shen that they
commissioned(?) for this article!
burkaman wrote 1 day ago:
Their portfolio is beautiful
HTML [1]: https://adazshen.com/
opticfluorine wrote 1 day ago:
Wow, what a portfolio! This one in particular caught my eye: [1] 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.
HTML [1]: https://adazshen.com/Viral-Placenta
iknowstuff wrote 1 day ago:
I thought it was ai generated lol
dylan604 wrote 1 day ago:
even when websites provide attribution for images, people don't
read them
jdw64 wrote 1 day 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
yieldcrv wrote 15 hours 14 min 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
stasomatic wrote 20 hours 11 min ago:
Canât answer that, nobody will likely to be able to ever, outside
religions. We are NBKs. How that happened, idk, some cosmic curse.
Dolphins didnât develop atlatals, broad heads, catapults, napalm,
and F35s.
HarHarVeryFunny wrote 23 hours 6 min 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
layer8 wrote 1 day 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 oneâs behavior regarding animals farther away that you see
and that can see you, to predict their behavior and plan oneâs own
behavior within a larger time horizon.
TheBigSalad wrote 1 day 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.
nobodyandproud wrote 1 day 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 thatâ¦
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 improveâeven if not strictly necessaryâvia 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.
zahlman wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day ago:
Being immersed in solvent can't help with things like graphic arts
and pottery.
Calavar wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day ago:
When did octopuses start breathing air?
Calavar wrote 1 day ago:
Octopuses are smart, but I've yet to see anything that suggests
they are smarter than dolphins or whales.
onlypassingthru wrote 1 day 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.
HTML [1]: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/octopuses-keep-surprisi...
SJC_Hacker wrote 4 hours 40 min ago:
Female octopi also die reproducing. Knowledge cannot be
passed from one generation to the next. Everything they know
is either instinctual or learned.
mapt wrote 1 day 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.
ekelsen wrote 1 day ago:
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 wrote 1 day 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 wrote 21 hours 36 min ago:
I would argue that not having any overlap between generations is
a bigger problem. It guarantees no accumulation of knowledge.
fhdkweig wrote 21 hours 23 min 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 wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day ago:
having arms is probably an advantage in developing tool-use, but
who knows!
vitally3643 wrote 1 day 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 wrote 1 day ago:
Fire, agriculture, electricity, AI.
Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.
dyauspitr wrote 18 hours 40 min ago:
AI hasnât taken its final form yet.
cmrdporcupine wrote 23 hours 48 min 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...)
vitally3643 wrote 23 hours 52 min 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.
vkou wrote 1 day 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 wrote 23 hours 48 min 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 wrote 23 hours 44 min 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 wrote 1 day ago:
AI is not important at all. Just make things more convenient, but
is completely unnecessary.
bdamm wrote 22 hours 4 min 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 wrote 20 hours 26 min ago:
I am a bit skeptical but cautiously optimistic about AI
âcreating novel ideasâ, if we are using âcreateâ
pedantically. Any interesting examples?
rogerrogerr wrote 20 hours 5 min ago:
Those math proofs from a few weeks back seem plausible.
artisin wrote 21 hours 11 min ago:
In no timeline nor carbon-based universe does GP's comment
age poorly.
anonymousiam wrote 1 day ago:
It looks like you've already done so with the order of the
sequence that you used.
smilespray wrote 1 day ago:
And a sample size of one.
nobodyandproud wrote 1 day ago:
We have counter examples of human pods that never really achieved
âcivilizationâ.
Whatâs missing that make them more akin to orcas or wolves?
HarHarVeryFunny wrote 22 hours 0 min ago:
Written language ?
Got it too easy ?
nobodyandproud wrote 30 min ago:
It doesnât have to be writing. At least one culture used
ropes and knots.
greiskul wrote 23 hours 41 min 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 wrote 23 hours 10 min ago:
For humans, I wonder if population size and density is also a
factor.
That is, if thereâs a critical mass and population size.
asdff wrote 22 hours 56 min 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.
vitally3643 wrote 1 day ago:
That's what I said, yes.
thangalin wrote 1 day ago:
My Impacts project depicts a scene from the prolonged bombardment, a
time when Earth was cratered by asteroids and comets:
* [1] *
HTML [1]: https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf#page=9
HTML [2]: https://impacts.to/bibliography.pdf
veqq wrote 16 hours 44 min ago:
That's really cool!
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