Yeah, but we did all of our discoveries as a land-based species. It's totally possible some water-based species would find other crazy useful early techniques, then eventually discover stuff like "fire" much further down the line with access to more robust technologies. Their scientific roadmap would look very different from ours, but there are so many weird tricks and techniques that would eventually lead towards some of the dominating processes we have.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

It's totally possible some water-based species would find other crazy useful early techniques

Such as?

Even then, they are still short-lived, non-social animals who don't raise their young. How do individual discoveries compound into robust technologies?