Tuesday, May 24, 2011

To Atlantis!

I wonder if it would be possible for a civilization to develop underwater. I'm not talking about like if we went out right now and tried to colonize the ocean, I'm talking about intelligent life evolving in an underwater enviroment. Is it always necessary for increasingly intelligent species to move towards, or could they continue to evolve in the ocean? The question is if it's a possibilty, and our planet is such that our species just didn't evolve that way, or if it actually just isn't possible. I suppose it's sort of presumptuous to assume that anything is impossible, the universe being infinitely large and all that.

So let's say it COULD happen. Now I'm left to wonder how exactly it would work. I'm assuming they wouldn't need to invent any sort of architecture, since you don't really NEED shelter underwater. Would they have a language? Dolphins seem to be able to communicate verbally underwater, so I suppose that there could somehow be a full, underwater language, although I imagine it would be pretty difficult to understand. Maybe they'd develop some kind of sign language, like those deaf kids that made up their own non-verbal language.*

Actually, considering how many aquatic species we have yet to discover, it'd be pretty trippy if we found out that something like this already exists. And again, I'm left to wonder how we'd handle that. Would they have civil rights? We need to plan for this stuff dammit!

*I don't have a source for this, but I remember reading about it somewhere or something.

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