I’m wondering if advanced technology possible without fire? Maybe on a very damp world where it might not have been accidentally discovered. Or maybe a planet with no lightning. Or maybe super-smart underwater beings.
Googling, I see I’m not the first to have wondered this, but I’m curious what the 'Dope thinks about this topic.
Is basket weaving an advanced technology? Much can be done with a good basket.
You can make cloths without fire, that will keep you warmer. You can have language, writing, music and arithmetic without fire. Make stone tools and shape gold and copper. I think these would be considered advanced.
Starting from the maxim that no advanced technology is possible without a basis built on simple technologies, fire weaves through almost every technology. But to start off, us humans (not stipulated in the OP) need fire to simply not die from exposure outside the tropics.
Fire sterilizes compromised water for consumption and makes scores of food sources safe / edible / more easily digested / more nutrious.
Fire is a universal basic tool for enhancing hunting and gathering activities (e.g. driving game, , nighttime hunting and fishing, encouraging new plant growth, so attracting game etc.), increasing the productivity of the land, e.g. slash- and-burn cultivation, and for extracting food off cereal grains.
Copious amounts of energy-dense foodstuffs is a prerequisite for advanced (human) technology. There is no writing, specialization etc. without a secure food surplus.
Fire is the only source of “articial” light outside advanced technology. Only in the high latitudes in the short summertime an artificial light source would not be needed for safety, productivity, social needs, etc., again, for us humans.
Fire is a basic tool for working down wood, when large amounts of wood needs to be removed and only stone and bone tools are available, ie. when making containers, watercraft etc.
Fire makes it possible to heat-bend wood, horn, antler etc. into new shapes for tools, weapons and vehicles.
Skins for clothing, bedding, containers etc. can be tanned without fire, but finishing the skins by smoking them makes them much more usable / durable during wet weather / other contact with water.
Stone can be knapped into tools without fire, but many tool stone types either require or greatly benefit from heat-treating, done with fire.
Gold is useless as a tool material, native copper little better. Any and every community-changing use of metals involves fire heavily, from smelting to casting and forging, to hardening and tempering (arguably, the Polar Inuit changed their communities some, with meteoric, cold-hammered iron).
Ceramics, brickwork and glass, are only possible with fire.
Primitive engines without fire - hmmm.
But, the OP is impossibly broad, with super-smart underwater beings on other planets on the table, so every treshold requiring the use of fire for us humans on this planet can be explained away by special conditions.
Well, yes, I suppose I did leave a little too much in my head. As for underwater beings, no need for off-planet stuff. Take away humans and give octopus another few million years and maybe they become intelligent enough to consider sophisticated tool making.
But I was thinking more along the lines of earth-like peoples but somehow in a living condition that precludes fires.
As for what constitutes advance technology, yes starting from scratch, baskets are a pretty big jump. But I was thinking more of metal working, radio tech, or even printing press - something like that.
No way solar could work or geo thermal? Or would building those technologies require fire?
Nothing more advanced than spears, farming, log cabins, and water wheels.
Can’t have a Bronze Age if you can’t smelt copper with other metals.
I would totally suggest a review of the following thread
Which should cover most of this thread - since without plants and fossil fuels, you’re not going to have much fire available.
And I would say yes, but it depends on how you define ‘advanced technology’.
Firing ceramics and making glass requires extreme heat, in the 1 000 to 2 000 C ( ~2 000 - 4 000 F) range. Not only fire, but very efficient, hot fires are needed. I’m not seeing solar or geo thermal could work in any fashion, although plenty of heat is available intermittently from inside the Earth.
For solar, if you had a lot of mirrors (even if they’re just ordinary glass without silvering) and arranged them right, you could get a fairly high temperature in the middle. How are you going to make the mirrors in the first place?
Octopodes are already intelligent enough and do make use of tools. Their problem is that they’re not social animals, so they don’t learn from others. Every octopus has to start from scratch, by itself. That makes them quite impressive, considering their relatively short life span and makes one ponder what they’d be capable of, should they turn social.
They’ve had millions (?) of years to do that though, so I don’t see that ever happening, even with the absence of humans.
“Advanced technology” needs to be defined, but I’m assuming this means post-Industrial Revolution level of technology?
No. You need fire to do metallurgy, and absent metallurgy, you won’t have advanced technology.
And no, “biotechnology” is a cop-out. You don’t get to gene manipulation without a technological base.
Yes, making those technologies do anything useful tech-wise would need fire.
You could possibly make a parabolic cooker with native gold hammered into thin sheets as mirrors. But you’re not going to be smelting metals with it. You’re definitely not going to be building something like this without a tech pyramid underlying it.
Fire has been an absolute game-changer for our genus; by a long way our most signficant discovery.
I would still say that the answer to the OP is “Yes” though. It’s just that an industrial revolution, heck, just smelting metals, would take a lot longer to happen in a society powered by windmills, water wheels and “beasts of burden”. Perhaps millions of years.
Having said that, there might be things that could fill some of the gap between oxen and nuclear power plants though.
Like, I guess, explosive chemicals? Not all explosions are thermal after all, so they are not explicitly ruled out by the “no fire” hypothetical.
May I recommend Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series… You may find it interesting.
If Octopus started hunting with nets to provide food for a future use and stored their catch in baskets I dare say that scholars would say that they had achieved an advanced technology. An advance technology being more advanced than they had previously exhibited being capable of achieving.
Why does advanced technology have to mimic human advanced technology (and specifically fire)? That’s setting the bar impossibly high to achieve in a short span of time. Wasn’t mankind making tools and harvesting wild crops before they mastered fire? Wasn’t complex tool making itself an advanced technology (not just using a stick to beat another animal with or to reach fruit).
I think technology can be generalized to “increase in the quantity of and the precise use of energy”. Fire, by which I mean the rapid oxidation of biomass, is extremely accessible. In principle, other energy sources could be used, but they won’t be as widespread or concentrated as fire. And that really hampers technology.
(Heavily snipped to particular point I want to emphasize.)
This is probably our most import use of fire. So important that we don’t often think about it. The vast majority of our nutrients and calories require us to heat-treat a food stuff in order to make those nutrients and calories available. Often while denaturing the harmful substances. Our Homo genus was doing this before we became sapiens. Of course, that may just be a particularity of our genus, but it gives us the surplus which allows us to do everything else.
I know you’re referring to more direct methods with fewer inherent limitations, but we’ve been manipulating genes via selective culling and breeding ever since we started domesticating plants and animals.
Are they?
Don’t a lot of creatures, including some primates, weave nests?
I think it’s the idea of a carryable container that’s the jump; not the ability to make one. Once the idea’s there, varying materials would work, and are/have been used.
– I think “advanced technology” developed without the use of fire would look a lot different than human technologies which have been developed with the use of fire. I wonder whether we’d have trouble recognizing it at first. Fire’s so central to our behavior that it’s pretty much gotten into our mindset about everything.
Define “mankind” – or, possibly, we became “mankind” partly due to using fire; which is now thought to go back to Homo erectus. It really is embedded in our essence.
Which is interesting to think about, because while fire’s essential to us, it’s also massively dangerous to us. We’ve developed into humans while assuming that it’s normal to live with, rely on, and actively nourish that which often seriously damages or kills us. I wonder whether that’s leaked over into our social relations.
I’m not talking about selective breeding. I’m talking about bioengineering. Breeding a teacup poodle or a sweeter melon is not what people are talking about when they say things like:
“organic tech” here never seems to just mean bigger ears of corn.
That’s the most disingenuous reading of “advanced technology” possible.
That may be so if you don’t include my follow up sentence of: “An advance technology being more advanced than they had previously exhibited being capable of achieving.”.
Isn’t a technological leap also an advancement in technology? Thus advanced technology. Aren’t cell phones considered advanced technology to people of the 1970’s?
Yes, I know what you’re talking about, you left out part of my post (emphasis added to omitted clause):
My comment was to point out that “genetic manipulation” includes more than just directly changing DNA.