It the only reason why intelligent, civilization building species developed on land and not on the ocean floor the lack of energy to drive necessary ecological complexity and amount of biomass it subsists on? (Land gets up to 1kW/m2 from the sun, and most ocean is dark.)
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Slower evolution of complex systems due to a lower energy gradient sounds plausible. But there seems to be an upper limit where systems can not evolve in highly energetic environments. At least all the carbon based ones.
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Our chemistry relies on numerous bonds that break outside of a relatively narrow temperature range. But life on earth all depends on the same first cell, so there was never any other option. No other evolvable self replicator to choose from!
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Not speculating on an answer but a third possibility could be taken into consideration: That it has not happened here is just a specific of our ecosystem. It may be different in similar systems in the universe.
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It brings up the philosophical question whether life would always evolve in the same way, if we had the possibility to perfectly simulate Earth's evolution multiple times.
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Could be related with the development of complex social structures and the use of appendices. Octopuses are well equipped but lacks complex social structures, cetaceans are poorly equipped but with complex social structures. Maybe just didn't happend even if it is as possible
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interesting intuition on the dimensionality piece for the difficulty of achieving structure underwater; random walks in 2d are ergodic, 3d ones aren't. mobility is also greater in H20 so you are diffusing faster in a higher dimensional space
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Maybe just not enough evolutionary pressure underwater. Much more stable maybe
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