Our civilization as we know it relies heavily upon trees for building materials, and ancient, dead plant matter for fuel. Also, we rely upon plant matter for food. But could our civilization, or some alien civilization, function without plant matter for fuels, building materials and food? How would you go about starting a civilization if plants never existed?
Plants are the foundation of any food chain, because they alone are capable of photosynthesis to convert solar energy into biochemical energy. Without plants, no other life food would get nutrients.
I fear we’d run out of oxygen.
As for building materials, there are a lot of options, such as steel and bricks.
There are certainly fuel options too. Hydro, nuclear, solar, wind, tides, etc.
One of the important roles that plants provide in the above is transforming sunlight into energy which can be used as food; it’s why they are the bottom (first) layer of most food chains. Animals get the energy they need for life either by (a) eating those plants, or (b) eating animals that eat those plants.
So, one would need to either (a) have other methods for your civilization to transform sunlight into food energy (e.g., animals developing the ability to photosynthesize), or (b) derive energy from some other source, such as the animals which live near hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean.
Edit: ninja’d by @Schnitte !
Assuming you mean bigger plants like trees for wood -
Many middle eastern building techniques use mud brick and clay to build their main structures. Of course, this relies on having minimal rain. Mud mixed with grass gives a certain amount of strength. Otherwise, there’s rock - use arches to cover decent ceiling widths (slate roof to shed water). There’s a whole area of ancient technology devoted to arched roof design.
India, where desperation long since denuded the landscape of viable firewood, uses dried cow patties as fuel. Of course, yes, this relies on plants, but only on very small ones - and is more efficient than trying to compress grass into a useable fuel by hand.
One might imagine a world where the food source is plankton or seaweed (but that’s a plant too?) instead of fibrous land based plants. Perhaps then bones would substitute for branches in construction.
For metals - I suppose at a certain point, humans might figure out to use reflective mirrors to produce the heat to bake pottery and melt metals; raw copper nuggets can occasionally be found in the wild and beaten and polished into shape, which was the origins of metallurgy I think. The Greeks allegedly knew how to use an army’s reflective flat shields to concentrate sunlight on enemy vessels.
One major source of oil before petroleum was whale oil, and whales eat plankton.
Obviously, they’d develop mental powers to tap into solar energy to do everything for them. Haven’t you ever read a comic book?
They could have done it, using the technology of the day, but there’s no evidence that anyone ever did it prior to the 20th century. In other words, yes, they were alleged, but the allegations were almost certainly false.
I’ll toss in wool for tent coverings and rope as an alternative shelter. Without wood poles, they would have to be strung from stone pillars? Wooly fish-eating or carnivore mammals? Fluffy seals? Killer sheep? There’s also leather as a tent material (Which IIRC the plains Indians used for their teepees. But again - need stone tent supports…)
The problem is, we don’t realize just how much energy our society used and uses. Enough to seriously affect the climate, obviously. Need for energy drove so much of our civilization. It drove the impetus to almost exterminate assorted marine mammals, including whales all over the world. The industrial revolution was triggered by the development of steam engines to drain coal mines, which were necessary because the wood supply was being used up in England and there was a need for fuel to meet the demand for producing metals. If we had to chop our own wood to supply everything we do, we’d not have time to do anything else.
Technically Not plants but Cyanobacteria. Earth started out with CO2 in the atmosphere. All the oxygen we have is due to Cyanobacteria. Also, earth at one time had higher oxygen levels than current.
Yes. You have nuclear fuels, geothermal energy, hydro power, solar, wind, ……
And the Alien civilization could be smart enough to have Cold fusion, which we have been trying for more that 1/2 a century without success.
(We have done hot fusion like Hydrogen Bombs)
But cold fusion technology doesn’t come out of thin air. Would a civilisation without access to plant-based construction material ever reach the technological level of mastering cold fusion?
A nitpick; cold fusion doesn’t exist; it is a myth.
What the people at ITER and the NIF (and elsewhere) are attempting to sustain is controlled, hot, contained fusion, which can be used to generate power.
It literally does. Nothing is thinner air than Hydrogen. And fusion is the joining of hydrogen atoms to make helium.
The problem is the kick-start. We learned about metallurgy from the rocks in cooking fires melting (copper, tin…) To melt a decent amount of metal requires an incredible amount of fuel compared to simple cooking. Melting iron and making steel requires even more, since the fuel needs forced air to get hot enough. (In New Jersey, the early ironworks denuded the primal forest for miles around each smelter.)
You need abundant metal to get to the next steps, things like experimenting with electricity. The amount of metal required to play with inventions like steam engines would be unthinkably expensive if it was all made with cow patties. Ditto for internal combustion engines (that run on animal-fat derived biofuels?) Just learning about electromagnetism would be difficult, let alone building a Tokomak. Even items as simple as the trucks and ships, or the factories that feed our needs - all require an abundance of metal which relies on the coal and oil we have.
Metal was scarce and valuable enough that when times became unsettled, looters would for example chip out the small lead anchors that held the Greek column blocks together. We also forget just how fortuitous it is that we have had a virtually limitless (until now) supply of easy-to-use fuels right below our feet.
I see two paths - a civilization starting from scratch would progress very slowly and perhaps never reach the level of technology we have. An imaginary colony on another planet, with the full technical know-how we have already, might eventually put together enough pieces to create the technology we have today - very slowly and only for a select few, until the tech reaches a critical mass where solar panels, solar furnaces, etc. can substitute for primitive energy inputs.
The problem with this argument is the assumption that life implies “Carbon based life.” It is true on earth, but thermodynamically it doesn’t have to be true. Silicon maybe another element.
I’m not sure what exactly the argument here is. Even if we assume life that’s not based on carbon, that life would - in order to melt metal from ore - require energy. That energy would have to come from some exothermic reaction that converts some matter with a higher energetic status into some other matter with a lower energetic status, releasing the difference in the form of heat. For us, the reactant in such reactions is usually some carbon compound, and the reaction is an oxydization of this reactant into CO2. In a non-carbon-based world, the reactant might be very different, but it would have to be a substance that stores some form of chemical energy. Would such substances simply be lying around on the planet? On Earth, they were produced by some plant by means of photosynthesis, which captured solar energy to produce the biomatter that contains this chemical energy.
Since the OP specified up to and including alien civilizations, I would assume the answer would be ‘of course’ given a (possibly) infinite universe.
Two options come to mind, the first from science fiction series West of Eden set on an alternate earth where saurian humanoids had an entirely biological derived technology. Or for a modern take, think of an alien species that communicate via a CRISPR like methodology, would have an easy time of building a similar structure that wasn’t based on heat-based metal technology. It wouldn’t be exactly like ours, but would still be a high level civilization, more advanced than ours in some ways.
A more ‘traditional’ tech tree could be built in a planet with some stable high-energy geothermal points - whether human or some alien equivalent, could develop smelting depending using the naturally occurring heat, as earth based points generate considerable heat based on type of rock/location/flow/etc. For a quick hit -
Should get us through cast iron levels of technology, but what direction they would go could be entirely different, because, well, aliens. I suspect they would take free energy in the form of various geothermal options for granted, the same way we do/did for fossil fuels.
I am not sure, I understand this line of questioning.
On earth as of the past 50 years, steel is extracted, on an industrial scale, from its ore using Hydrogen. This hydrogen can come from splitting water using nuclear, carbon based or many other energy forms.
Electricity can be used to heat up the ore and hydrogen can then be used to reduce it to metal. Not sure where the requirement of an Exothermic reaction comes from.
Ah, I see you’ve played Dwarf Fortress too.