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Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself

(www.quantamagazine.org)

51 points

by ibobev2 hours ago |
33 comments
upvoteby thangalin1 hours ago|
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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

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upvoteby martzy1328 minutes ago|
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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

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upvoteby oneneptune1 hours ago|
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Wow what an awesome art piece by Ada Zejun Shen that they commissioned(?) for this article!
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upvoteby burkaman1 hours ago|
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Their portfolio is beautiful https://adazshen.com/
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upvoteby opticfluorine27 minutes ago|
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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.

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upvoteby iknowstuff1 hours ago|
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I thought it was ai generated lol
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upvoteby dylan6041 hours ago|
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even when websites provide attribution for images, people don't read them
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upvoteby jdw641 hours ago|
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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
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upvoteby vitally36431 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby aurareturn40 minutes ago|
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Fire, agriculture, electricity, AI.

Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.

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upvoteby vitally36431 minutes ago|
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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.
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upvoteby aozame10 minutes ago|
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AI is not important at all. Just make things more convenient, but is completely unnecessary.
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upvoteby anonymousiam16 minutes ago|
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It looks like you've already done so with the order of the sequence that you used.
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upvoteby vkou9 minutes ago|
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Nuclear weapons and fossil fuels and the C-corporation will probably turn out to be more important to the long-term future of humanity and it's civilization.
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upvoteby smilespray1 hours ago|
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And a sample size of one.
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upvoteby vitally36431 hours ago|
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That's what I said, yes.
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upvoteby nobodyandproud58 minutes ago|
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We have counter examples of human pods that never really achieved “civilization”.

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

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upvoteby Calavar1 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby onlypassingthru1 hours ago|
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When did octopuses start breathing air?
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upvoteby Calavar55 minutes ago|
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Octopuses are smart, but I've yet to see anything that suggests they are smarter than dolphins or whales.
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upvoteby onlypassingthru15 minutes ago|
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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-...

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upvoteby mapt49 minutes ago|
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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.
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upvoteby ekelsen1 hours ago|
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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"?).

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upvoteby fhdkweig12 minutes ago|
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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.
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upvoteby sarkhan1 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby ekelsen32 minutes ago|
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having arms is probably an advantage in developing tool-use, but who knows!
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upvoteby zahlman1 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby card_zero1 hours ago|
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Being immersed in solvent can't help with things like graphic arts and pottery.
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upvoteby layer822 minutes ago|
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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.
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upvoteby TheBigSalad57 minutes ago|
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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.
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upvoteby nobodyandproud1 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby ck226 minutes ago|
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Maybe some of Earth's oceans came from its rings collapsing (not kidding)

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

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upvoteby doublerabbit25 minutes ago|
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200 years from now on HN.

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

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