Actually, it came from an old D&D campaign we did two decades ago, but was reasonable well researched. But yes, it was a dwarven forge - so the trope stands true.
Apparently, for younger gamers, it’s something you can do in Minecraft as well, but that isn’t one of the games I play (too many other time absorbers rather than any sort of too cool to play issue).
Sure, but to reach the level where we can use nuclear energy, we had to go through previous, technologically more primitive stages where nuclear was not available, but plant-based sources of energy (which includes fossil) were. Which sources of energy would be available to such a more primitive civilization that are not plant-based but allow for the melting of ore?
Explain to me why Aliens have to follow the same development path as humans. There is nothing thermodynamically that says nuclear fusion has to discovered after waterwheels or wind energy.
Explain to me why the laws of thermodynamics are the only constraint that we have to keep in mind here.
What would you propose that bypasses the sequence of technology that we have gone through?
Most tech we developed in the order we did because it was necessary to finish one step before taking the other.
i.e. Electricity requires metal; metal requires heat, and frequently enough to develop an experience with metallurgy. Inducing electricity requires magnets of a decent strength. Tokomak fusion reactors require extremely strong electromagnets. Then there’s the whole development of chemistry to understand the periodic table, the elements, then subatomic particles and how fusion and fission work. Knowing detailed metallurgy is required for making very strong magnets. etc.
And so on. By pure luck, aliens may discover some particular principles of science ahead of the order humans did - but the leap to fusion, or even metallurgy, is unlikely without abundant fuel and thousands of scientists contributing over time. Even power tools and powered transport are the result of centuries of technical development. Tinkerers built some pretty inefficient steam engine pumps for a few decades before guys like Watt perfected them. People tinkering requires a decent supply of the materials necessary to build what the experimenters want.
Again, you are thinking about earth. Metal occurred free form on earth albeit in limited quantities (thinks meteorites).
Alien worlds don’t need to have this limitation.
Okay; here’s a scenario which has metal technology but no smelting. A moderately intelligent species of hive-worms on an alien planet cultivates certain types of fungi (actually, they aren’t fungi per se, but rather fungi-analogs with only a superficial similarity to Earth species). These xeno-fungi can absorb and metabolise the local alien soil, which is rich in a wide range of metals, but thet extrude crystals of metal as a waste product in order to avoid metal toxicity. The intelligent species collect these shards of metal and use them as tiny tools, and weave the strands together into decorations and ropes. Eventually they hive-worms discover electrochemical potentials, and start making simple electrical circuits and motors.
The most successful hive-worm colonies now begin to produce a wide range of metal products, and become larger and more complex, increasing their available processing power until they become at least as smart as humans, and construct a telecommunication network that covers their globe.
Not sure how they could make the leap to constructing macroscale objects such as steam engines, tanks, aircraft and spacecraft, but these are very resourceful worms.
Wowsers! I’d never realised that the extinction of the mammoth represented an economic disaster for the residential construction industries.
2,730 °F is the temperature you need to extract iron from ore.
True - if we’re talking about smelting -on earth- where most available iron is some form of oxide (damn reactive stuff that oxygen). Not a given for alien or non-human assumptions, and iron of sufficient purity would be able to be worked at sub melting and sub smelting temperatures as well.
That’s for cast iron in a smelter. You can get wrought iron out of ore at about 750 °C (roughly 1400 °F) with a bloomery. Wrought iron is what Western civilization used until the late Medieval Period. Not sure how it would work using volcanic heat instead of charcoal. Probably wouldn’t work.
No it doesn’t - as already said, native metals and meteoric metals are both a thing, and an alien planet geochemistry may entail different native metals, while an alien star system may have a different abundance of meteoric ones.
And then there’s biological production of magnetite, if magnets are your concern.
Not necessarily. Chemical batteries aren’t just for storage.
OK, we could have alien biology that for example, creates bones or shells using some metals rather than calcium. Giant spiders or silkworms that create big conductive fibers you then wind around electric eels. Fill a hovercraft with eels and you have a viable source of electricity.
I guess the question is - how far are you willing to depart from current (sorry) earthling biology? Giant bees that exude calcium-based wax so you can saw up their honeycomb as building panels? Mash up a certain type of worm and their gooey bodies work as glue? There have been plenty of stories of gas-bag creatures that produce hydrogen to enable themselves to fly (but stay away from the flame!!!) Orc eggs strong enough to be pressure vessels for steam engines?
Anything goes, and the only proviso I would require is - explain how this adaptation would benefit the creature and so evolve, and how the creature’s metabolism allows it to work. (How did those orc chicks get out of the shells???) Most earthly biology either uses photosynthesis to create carbohydrates (conveniently releasing oxygen) or consumes some form of carbohydrates (and maybe oxygen) to get the energy and raw materials for life. I recall one SF story had worms that ate their way through rock - why, and how? Most rock does not have nutritional value, which is why earth life generally goes around it.
(Should also point out that King Tut had an iron dagger almost a millennium before the iron age - it’s assumed to be a meteorite remains found in the desert and beaten to shape without getting it hot enough to melt. )
That presupposes that the alien lifeforms evolved naturally, rather than were modified by breeding or direct intervention, which we mentioned earlier. The OP would probably have helped their case if alien life-forms weren’t build into the original post if we didn’t want to have widely available hypotheticals, even in FQ.
Because (back to earth example) the degree to which domesticated animal (or other lifeforms) practicality has often been heavily compromised by our selection of traits that are useful to us or just attractive!
In this case, the modified beings are inheriting their civilization from another species. Which just pushes the question back one step, but doesn’t answer it.
Sorry, that was entirely my failure to be clear. Earlier in the thread, I presupposed an alien entity that communicated via some equivalent of viral DNA, analogous to CRISPR among their own kind, who then used their ‘language’ to modify their own environment.
Such an alien would be able to handily modify other creatures in their environment to produce materials including metal and other materials for a technology comparable to our own, even if the producing creatures had a net loss of survivability.
Back to the point of the thread though, we as humans can imagine ways to accomplish (in fiction frequently, in fact, well, it’s theoretical) the goals of a technological society without the advantages we’ve had so far on earth. Given the size of the universe, it could have worked out that way somewhere, but we’ll never likely know it to to the ineffable hugeness of space. Most of what we’re doing is a bit far affield for factual questions though.
One thing we haven’t mentioned though is cultural - we tend to assume that a technological society would mass produce said technology - which isn’t a given. I could easily see a human (or human like) society where a vast percentage lives without the benefits of most technology, performing material gathering and subsistence while supporting a technological elite that use the tech entirely for their own needs.
This would vastly reduce the needs for the large scale production that was objected too earlier in the thread, as it wouldn’t be needed other than perhaps in a few central technocratic/philosopher king communities.
The problem with this is that they’d have to know that such materials could exist in the first place. That’s probably not a problem with things like fibers but how do they know about iron, glass, or lime? Those all take high temperatures to produce in our world. They were discovered by heating up different kinds of rock and seeing what happened. But these aliens don’t heat up stuff.
But most of those things do exist, albeit in what we consider non-industrial qualities on Earth, and presumably on our ‘alien’ world. Volcanic glass, meteoric iron (or earlier, reasonably pure copper) are real things of course. And there is no mention in the OP about no heat - just no plant based fuels.
An alien civilization that makes primary use of biotechniques could also use mechanical/heat based techniques, if possibly later and with less skill. It’s something of the inverse of the situation on earth, we developed mechanical technologies remarkably quickly, but biological techniques came comparatively late - and we still do better with mechanical treatments (surgery and micro surgery) and are only slowly developing a tool kit for biologics.
Again, per the OP, we’re just developing a civilization - it doesn’t have to be at the same level of development or the same type as ours. Assuming aliens, I would again assume they could be better than us in some areas, and worse in others. But again, that’s all IMHO. And civilization is something of a loaded term anyway - Ancient Egypt had a developed civilization for centuries without advanced metalworking - but it had mythology, culture, significant engineering skills and the like.
But for people (or aliens) to experiment with some things, they have to be available is sufficient quantities for the tinkerers to tinker. Like I said, there were multiple iterations of a steam engine before the most efficient one was invented. This means many people had access to enough iron to build steam engines. The Wright brothers built their own engine from available materials, meaning a bunch of back-room tinkerers (bicycle makers) had access to sufficient industrial materials to build a gasoline engine. (The commercial cast iron ones were too heavy.) A society with a small technical/rich elite will have fewer of these dreamers.
We remember the big names - Wrights, Mongolfiers, Madame Curie, Newton, Eli Whitney, Lord Kelvin, Kepler, Lillenthal, etc. - because they succeeded. They were, however, only a few of the many who had similar interests in those fields and also puttered around. With less material available, the speed of discovery would be far far slower. (But yes, not impossible) We need only look to the dreamers like da Vinci who had great ideas but never the wherewithal to implement them, or even find out they would not work.
Then consider the basis of our society - the written word. Without it, so much is lost in time. With it, each generation builds on previous ones. What would be the equivalent for a biological- based society? Would some people be libraries, full of a vast library of DNA? Would there be a way to preserve this knowledge outside their bodies, or would everyone be a roving encyclopedia? At what point is knowledge saturated, and the beings must forget some data to retain new data? (Which makes for an interesting story idea…) How do you provide stability for data, or redundancy, considering gene copying errors are not uncommon? (or does data corrupt over time if not used, also an interesting story idea…)
I’m not a biologist, but why are heavy metals so rare in life systems? We use iron in blood, but nowhere do we or other animals exude metals - except calcium.
To us earthlife . To a silicon-based life-form, who knows…
Although nutrition isn’t the only reason an organism may burrow through rock.
Sand doesn’t have nutritional value to earth life, but lots of things ingest it in the process of eating the stuff inbetween, like worms and crabs.