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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5907364" data-attributes="member: 4937">They wouldn't.  Aquatic tech is not fire based, so it takes a very long time for an Aquatic culture to discover things like smelting.  They can conceivably get there eventually by learning to manage membranes and bubbles and so forth, but the upwards technology path is not as obvious.Aquatic tech would have to be initially based on biochemistry, nanotechnology, and so forth.  You start with selective breeding and domestication and move up.  One thing you have to understand is that civilizations effect strongly how things in their vicinity evolve.  The dog didn't get started with selective breeding.  It got started with evolutionary pressure to adapt to a human dominated habitat.  So its going to be difficult to imagine what the ecology of an ocean is like that is farmed, domesticated, and the food sources dominated by a technologically advanced civilization, but its probably going to be different.  I would think that a dominate aquatic species would initially naturally evolve its symbiots.  Of course, it might also evolve its pest species, so that would be a challenge.Because you are in a liquid medium, the ultimate technology is always the container, and the best containers are the ones that are alive and fill themselves up.On the whole, the challenges of developing technology in the ocean are such that I think it would be rather rare that a world first gets there with an aquatic species.  Intelligence is just not as useful in the ocean as it is on land.  We don't really have much evidence that anything in the ocean has ever gotten much smarter than a cat, and creatures like dolphins are dominate sea creatures pretty much completely without the need for digits much less technology.</blockquote>

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