Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself(www.quantamagazine.org)
55 pointsby ibobev3 hours ago6 comments
  • thangalin2 hours ago
    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

  • martzy1333 minutes 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: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09630-7

  • oneneptune2 hours ago
    Wow what an awesome art piece by Ada Zejun Shen that they commissioned(?) for this article!
    • burkamanan hour ago
      Their portfolio is beautiful https://adazshen.com/
      • opticfluorine32 minutes ago
        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.

    • iknowstuffan hour ago
      I thought it was ai generated lol
      • dylan604an hour ago
        even when websites provide attribution for images, people don't read them
  • jdw642 hours 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
    • vitally36432 hours 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.

      • aurareturnan hour ago
        Fire, agriculture, electricity, AI.

        Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.

        • vitally36437 minutes 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.
        • cmrdporcupine3 minutes 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...)

        • aozame16 minutes ago
          AI is not important at all. Just make things more convenient, but is completely unnecessary.
        • anonymousiam22 minutes ago
          It looks like you've already done so with the order of the sequence that you used.
        • vkou15 minutes 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.
          • vitally36433 minutes 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.

      • smilesprayan hour ago
        And a sample size of one.
        • vitally3643an hour ago
          That's what I said, yes.
        • nobodyandproudan hour ago
          We have counter examples of human pods that never really achieved “civilization”.

          What’s missing that make them more akin to orcas or wolves?

    • Calavaran hour 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.
      • onlypassingthruan hour ago
        When did octopuses start breathing air?
        • Calavaran hour ago
          Octopuses are smart, but I've yet to see anything that suggests they are smarter than dolphins or whales.
          • onlypassingthru20 minutes 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.

            https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/octopuses-keep-surprising-us-...

          • maptan hour 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.
    • ekelsenan hour 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"?).

      • fhdkweig18 minutes 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.
      • sarkhanan hour 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.

        • ekelsen38 minutes ago
          having arms is probably an advantage in developing tool-use, but who knows!
    • zahlmanan hour 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_zeroan hour ago
        Being immersed in solvent can't help with things like graphic arts and pottery.
    • layer828 minutes 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 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.
    • TheBigSaladan hour 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.
    • nobodyandproudan hour 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 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.

  • ck232 minutes ago
    Maybe some of Earth's oceans came from its rings collapsing (not kidding)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPhwhq-f1Uo

  • doublerabbit31 minutes ago
    200 years from now on HN.

    "Where Did Earth Get Its Deserts? Maybe It's Ai, Datacentres and Climate Change"