Re: Ocean Floor Civilization

Logan Kearsley wrote:
This is two questions, really.
First one: if you had a civilization scattered over the abyssal plains, with
no contact with the surface, at what point would they be likely to become
aware of the existence of another civilization developing on land / the
ocean surface? What if they also spread out over the continental shelves?

My guess would be when the first large ships start sinking in deep
ocean. This could be all the way back in the age of sail. It'd be a rare
opportunity at first, since ships would start out few and far between; a
lot would depend on the vagaries of where seafloor population centers
were relative to the surface trade routes.

As the industrial revolution starts kicking into full swing an advanced
seafloor civilization might notice tell-tale chemicals in the river
effluent, though that'd be less obvious.

Second question: what kind of tech level could a deep-ocean civilization
maintain, assuming that they could have as much help as they needed from the
surface to get set up? You could use turbines in ocean currents to generate
electricity, and geothermal power, but could you do extensive metallurgy to
make new stuff and maintain what you've got? How about making ceramics? I'm
assuming that it's not plausible to maintain large gas-filled enclosures at
the bottom of the ocean in anything like conditions that would allow simply
copying industrial processes used on land.

Well, we managed to put bathyspheres down there so _small_ enclosures
aren't impossible. You might be able to scale down some industrial
processes to fit in them.

I wonder if one could do metallurgy in a mineral oil medium or some
other nonreactive liquid. Thermal conductivity would be high so you'd
need to dump a lot of extra energy in to keep things hot, but lava
manages it. Maybe concentrate industrial centers at the mid-ocean
trenches where they can make use of natural heat.
.

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