[HN Gopher] Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them I...
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Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself
Author : ibobev
Score : 114 points
Date : 2026-06-12 15:32 UTC (11 hours ago)
HTML web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
TEXT w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| thangalin wrote:
| My Impacts project depicts a scene from the prolonged
| bombardment, a time when Earth was cratered by asteroids and
| comets:
|
| * https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf#page=9
|
| * https://impacts.to/bibliography.pdf
| veqq wrote:
| That's really cool!
| jdw64 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| smilespray wrote:
| And a sample size of one.
| vitally3643 wrote:
| That's what I said, yes.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Written language ?
|
| Got it too easy ?
| aurareturn wrote:
| Fire, agriculture, electricity, AI.
|
| Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| It looks like you've already done so with the order of the
| sequence that you used.
| aozame wrote:
| AI is not important at all. Just make things more
| convenient, but is completely unnecessary.
| bdamm wrote:
| 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.
| artisin wrote:
| In no timeline nor carbon-based universe does GP's
| comment age poorly.
| stasomatic wrote:
| I am a bit skeptical but cautiously optimistic about AI
| "creating novel ideas", if we are using "create"
| pedantically. Any interesting examples?
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| Those math proofs from a few weeks back seem plausible.
| vkou wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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.
| vitally3643 wrote:
| 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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 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...)
| dyauspitr wrote:
| AI hasn't taken its final form yet.
| ekelsen wrote:
| 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"?).
| sarkhan wrote:
| 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:
| having arms is probably an advantage in developing tool-
| use, but who knows!
| fhdkweig wrote:
| 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:
| I would argue that not having any overlap between
| generations is a bigger problem. It guarantees no
| accumulation of knowledge.
| fhdkweig wrote:
| 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.
| Calavar wrote:
| 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:
| When did octopuses start breathing air?
| Calavar wrote:
| Octopuses are smart, but I've yet to see anything that
| suggests they are smarter than dolphins or whales.
| mapt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/octopuses-keep-surprising-
| us-...
| zahlman wrote:
| 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:
| Being immersed in solvent can't help with things like graphic
| arts and pottery.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| 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.
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| 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
| stasomatic wrote:
| 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.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > 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
| oneneptune wrote:
| Wow what an awesome art piece by Ada Zejun Shen that they
| commissioned(?) for this article!
| iknowstuff wrote:
| I thought it was ai generated lol
| dylan604 wrote:
| even when websites provide attribution for images, people
| don't read them
| burkaman wrote:
| Their portfolio is beautiful https://adazshen.com/
| opticfluorine wrote:
| Wow, what a portfolio! This one in particular caught my eye:
| https://adazshen.com/Viral-Placenta
|
| 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.
| martzy13 wrote:
| 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:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09630-7
| lightedman wrote:
| 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:
| Could this have happened under the pressure of the
| interplanetary collision with the protoplanet "Theia" that
| led to the creation of the moon?
| ck2 wrote:
| Maybe some of Earth's oceans came from its rings collapsing (not
| kidding)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPhwhq-f1Uo
| doublerabbit wrote:
| 200 years from now on HN.
|
| "Where Did Earth Get Its Deserts? Maybe It's Ai, Datacentres and
| Climate Change"
| module1973 wrote:
| Earth made water.. right.. and a big explosion made the earth?
| How stupid do you think we all are?
| petermcneeley wrote:
| They have played us all for absolute fools!
| fragmede wrote:
| How could the Earth be round? All the water would fall right
| off!
| escape_42 wrote:
| i imagine this is what happens when a giant iceball starts to
| melt
| userulluipeste wrote:
| _" 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.
| kbelder wrote:
| 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.
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| 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.
| hofo wrote:
| As opposed to what, a gift from aliens?
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