This is something that I think about sometimes. Life on Earth has had billions of years and expanded to fill so many niches, but they're nearly all damp niches. Nothing has ever really managed to really thrive in deserts. Sure, there are a few cacti, succulents, a bit of scrub, a few palms and rodents and a few birds that eke out an existence. But really it's mostly barren, compared to temperate or tropical climates where nature takes over land entirely within years. Yes, the soil in deserts is poor, but that's a consequence: it was poor everywhere before plants conditioned it. It's just that evolution has never in a billion years hit on a way to capitalise on all that sunlight and those day/night temperature gradients without enough water to float all the microbiology in.
Probably just as well (invoke some kind of anthropic principle here if you like) or we'd have, say, fungus there can quickly eat dry things and storing food or building anything with longevity would be much harder.
> Life on Earth has had billions of years and expanded to fill so many niches, but they're nearly all damp niches. Nothing has ever really managed to really thrive in deserts.
By definition, the desert "niche" IS filled. It has as much life as it can support. That doesn't mean wall-to-wall forest; you wouldn't expect to find that covering a field of barely weathered granite, either.
All life on Earth uses water to transport chemicals and ions across its cells. Period. It's one immutable requirement of life on Earth.
I wonder if there's some general mathematical description one could form of the biomass per acre versus water content of the "surface soil". The oceans provide the extreme, but even then there are "biodeserts" far from land where there are insufficient nutrients (organic chemicals, probably) to keep even algae going.
an unfilled niche would have the known properties of life with resources so bounding that there isn't a strict need for competition for survival. (a brand new uncovered dish of agar media)
a populated biome has an active +- exchange of resources between participants that facilitates the need for competition due to resource bounds. (the rain forest, most of the biological world)
a sterile biome has no known properties of life, and no known participants. The participants that are there struggle to exist or are in some form of stasis to survive the condition. (a brand-new sealed blood vacuum vial.)
as for 'as much as it can support', i'm unaware of how to determine an optimal maxima for biological growth independent of species or environment. Maybe some exotic sphere-packing type idea might work with a reward function for 'resources' ? I don't know.
If there were an evolutionary advantage for more things to being in an arid region over being in a place with abundant, easily accessible water, I reckon the niche would have been filled. the natural world isn't really "interested", for lack of a better term, in maximal efficiency outside the context of following the path of least resistance in any given domain. Lightning might strike your chimney even tho there's a giant metal tower 300 feet in the air a quarter mile down the road that appears to be a much better path to ground.
There is plenty of natural selection pressure on not being eaten. If a mold or something could evolve to live off of a dry atmosphere plus sunlight and whatever minerals it can eek out of rocks, it could blanket millions of square kilometers of desert. Presumably other living things would find it hard to digest because its protein and chemical structures are so different. Nature is constantly finding weird little niches at the edge of sustainability. Waterless deserts should present an enormous opportunity for something to fill, but it hasn't happened.
Except in science fiction (so far); see, for example, "Dragon's Egg," Robert L. Forward's superb 1980 novel of life on a neutron star with surface gravity 67 billion times that of Earth:
May be unrelated, but it's also kinda funny how to cut / process / shape stone and rock you need a crap load of water, all the drills and saws for stone are wet in a way.
Cooling, lubrication, debris removal and dust control. Mostly in that order.
But yeah, you're completely right about the chisel. Hammer and chisel is how we've processed rocks for most of history (all the way back to flint knapping).
Wet processing for tile/stone is really only about 100 years old, since we didn't have a usable cutting abrasive until diamond blades came around in the late 1800s.
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All that aside, the problem with a hammer & chisel is that it's hard to be precise. It's not impossible, but it's definitely a skill requiring mastery.
If we expand the scope a little and include ceramics - then yes, we did need quite a bit of water.
Brick, Clay, Cement, etc - they were all good alternatives to chiseling stone to get a very hard, stone-like material in a very specific shape, and they all require good amounts of water.
>The models estimated that Oldowan stone tools originated 2.617-2.644 million years ago, 36,000 to 63,000 years earlier than current evidence. The Acheulean’s origin was pushed back further by at least 55,000 years to 1.815-1.823 million years ago.
These days, with high-power cutting tools also for cooling. If you have a 50 HP saw, that energy has to go somewhere, and it doesn't all go into the dust and get carried away. If carbide blades get too hot, the solder melts and the brazed inserts fall out, and for steel, carbide and diamonds, the hotter they get the softer they get and and the faster the tool wears.
And other than the cost of the tools, there is one thing harder to drill than a rock, and that's a rock with the previous drill bit's carbide insert stuck at the bottom of the hole!
Cacti aswell, mostly thrive because of desert floods. They've evolved to quickly suck up as much water as they can, then they use a special acidic form of photosynthesis to make it last as long as possible.
Different desert plants use similar ideas, the Aussie outback for example blooms for about a month after a given flood, reproduces, then dies out near completely except around the occasional waterhole.
Even then, you don't have to spend much time in a desert to realise that what does grow is in low lying places where there's water underground, or where brief rains collect.
Probably just as well (invoke some kind of anthropic principle here if you like) or we'd have, say, fungus there can quickly eat dry things and storing food or building anything with longevity would be much harder.