I was thinking about the way in which humans have developed technology and particularly metal tools.
Under earth-like conditions (gravity, atmospheric pressure and makeup etc), it wouldn’t be possible for a creature the size of say, a mouse to be able to smelt and work metals such as iron on their own scale*, would it?
*'m thinking that it wouldn’t be possible to get a scaled-down small fire hot enough to smelt the ores, and working thin bars of steel (maybe about the thickness of paperclip wire) by heating and hammering wouldn’t work; they would cool too rapidly and in any case a scaled-down hammer wouldn’t be very effective. It would also be a monumentally difficult task for small animals to overcome these difficulties by working at our scale.
So should we expect any aliens we (hypothetically) meet to be at least the size of humans?
No, that’s quite wrong. For example, as you get smaller you will find that water (and air) become more viscous. The example given in the OP, of fire, is also a very good one. Also the “graininess” of materials is more relevant to small-scale beings.
In engineering modelling, for example, you will find that a scale model of a ship will not behave in the same way as the real ship. You can overcome this by using a less viscous fluid instead of water for your model. It’s a matter of making the relevant dimenionless numbers the same as the full-scale case, but you can’t do that for all of them at the same time.
I found the OP very thought-provoking, and I must say I don’t know the answer yet. I can’t help thinking that the small-scale beings might have advantages as well as disadvantages, and might have a different technological development.
Can’t comment on the smelting of iron by ants, but smaller animals use the effects hibernicus mentioned to their advantage. Ants carry droplets of water around, for example, without needing a container, because surface tensions is strong enough to hold the droplet together. If you had small intelligent critters, I think they could have pretty ingenious technologies that would seem quite foreign to us. There must be a few sci-fi stories on this topic!
However, I would think (IANAB) that the major obstacle to that scenario would be packing critical mass of neurons required to acheive actual intelligence into a small body.
Brain size is proportional to body size because the bigger the body, the bigger the brain needed to control it, which is why elephant brains are bigger than humans, though elephants aren’t more intelligent than us. So in addition to the minimum brain size needed to control the body, there’s some additional mass of brain needed for intelligent thought. I don’t know how much that is (i.e. how much bigger is a human brain than the brains of other animals of comperable mass) but it might just be too much mass for a small animal to lug around.
One way around the brain size issue is collective intelligence. Not a single ant holds the necessary “knowledge” to build a mound, farm aphids, etc, but the group as a whole can do these things because of the complex interactions between individuals. The colony itself is the “brain”. We don’t completely understand collective intelligence yet, but I think some form of it could develop technology. Of course, that technology would be quite different from our own, as podkayne said.
A colony of ant like creature could conveivably create some kind of machine, say out of dried mud, that could smelt iron, but it would take the colony as a whole and not one little guy swinging a tiny hammer. It would also require that the colony had developed its own special technology first. A whole society of colonies may even be required to build the machine. I would guess that metallurgy would happen much later in their technological development.
This, obviously, is just wild-ass speculation on my part.
mv^2 should play a significant role, too, shouldn’t it?
Small but reasonably massive objects accelerate the same as anything else with gravity, but it would pick up energy with the square of the v. This is why when you drop a nail onto a concrete floor, it tends to bounce far away from where it fell, unlike a hammer. I suppose a similar thing would happen if a mouse-sized hammer was swung.
I don’t know exactly how it would work out, but mouse-sized tools would have to be adapted to a high-energy, low-mass environment. That might require mouse-tools to have a very high structural rigidity from the get-go, something with which the rats of NIMH might have problems. It would suck to have to invent surgical steel just to make a decent can-opener.
Then there’s coefficient of friction, which I don’t want to touch.
Thinking a bit more about the collective organism that Beeblebrox proposed and I like the idea; it’s interesting though that the total mass of the individuals in the colony capable of such organisation would most likely add up to that of a human or more, so maybe my idea still stands (since in this case it’s really the entire colony that is the ‘individual’).
Perhaps in such a case though, they would largely skip metallurgy and develop a technology based on ceramics or some sort of biological processes.
<<Perhaps in such a case though, they would largely skip metallurgy and develop a technology based on ceramics or some sort of biological processes.>>
Medieval China and Japan didn’t rely quite as heavily as the Western civilizations on metal and stone, as I recall? Maybe examining those cultures might be an interesting addition to this line of thought. You know, to see what you can do with the right resources.
Just a thought.
