Hacker News

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

46 points by ibobev 3 hours ago | 29 comments

martzy13 16 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

thangalin 2 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

oneneptune 2 hours ago

Wow what an awesome art piece by Ada Zejun Shen that they commissioned(?) for this article!

burkaman 50 minutes ago

Their portfolio is beautiful https://adazshen.com/

opticfluorine 14 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.

iknowstuff 2 hours ago

I thought it was ai generated lol

dylan604 54 minutes ago

even when websites provide attribution for images, people don't read them

jdw64 2 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

vitally3643 2 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.

aurareturn 28 minutes ago

Fire, agriculture, electricity, AI.

Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.

anonymousiam 4 minutes ago

It looks like you've already done so with the order of the sequence that you used.

smilespray 2 hours ago

And a sample size of one.

vitally3643 59 minutes ago

That's what I said, yes.

nobodyandproud 46 minutes 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?

Calavar 60 minutes 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.

onlypassingthru 51 minutes ago

When did octopuses start breathing air?

Calavar 43 minutes ago

Octopuses are smart, but I've yet to see anything that suggests they are smarter than dolphins or whales.

onlypassingthru 3 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-...

mapt 37 minutes 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.

layer8 10 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 you see moving, to predict their behavior and plan one’s own behavior within a larger time horizon.

ekelsen 2 hours 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"?).

sarkhan 57 minutes 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.

ekelsen 20 minutes ago

having arms is probably an advantage in developing tool-use, but who knows!

zahlman 56 minutes 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_zero 49 minutes ago

Being immersed in solvent can't help with things like graphic arts and pottery.

TheBigSalad 45 minutes 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.

nobodyandproud 48 minutes 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.

ck2 14 minutes ago

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

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

doublerabbit 13 minutes ago

200 years from now on HN.

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