Mind=blown! fenerismoon came up with this interesting “humans are space orcs” post about humans and fire. What if humans are the only species to evolve to use fire? 🔥
Source: fenerismoon
(via: Imgur)
Humans and Fire
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As long as the official report uses the local term “and ‘yeet’ as they say, themselves into space”
Earth….. Mostly harmless
The one thing about fire, from an evolutionary view, is that fire, as you say, “denatures” meat. Cooked meat takes a lot less time to chew than uncooked meat. So, once people discovered fire, they could cook meat and eat it in a small fractioxin of the time that it would take to chew uncooked meat.
What do you do with the time you save? You start inventing things like agriculture and domestication, refining metals, etc., etc., etc.
I’d be willing to venture that, if we had not discovered fire, we would still be hunter, gatherers, existing in small groups only.
So, your hypothetical other beings would have had to have found some way to jump that same (or a similar barrier) in order to congregate enough to develop some technologies.
That’s the assumption that alien races would even eat meat that needs to be cooked for optimum nutritional value. Some could subsist entirely upon plant like material, others could get their nutrition from sunlight and air because they are basically plants themselves. Some that do eat meat could just swallow their food whole and not even worry about chewing so the whole digestion process takes place in their gut and doesn’t start in the mouth like ours does.
Aliens who evolved from aquatic filter feeders.
Aliens with hive minds and societies like some of our insect colonies where some members of the hive eat the raw food then from them the rest of the colony eats as the now partially processed food is regurgitated.
Different species take different evolutionary paths. On earth we just happened to have the advantage because using fire to eat cooked meat gave us an advantage. On other planets other species could have had some other type of advantage and maybe they evolved slower than us for the set of stories to be right they are still more highly evolved than us in certain aspects.
“Some could subsist entirely upon plant like material, others could get their nutrition from sunlight and air because they are basically plants themselves.”
It’s extremely unlikely that either herbivores or plants could ever become the ruling species of their native planet. There is a reason we talk about apex predators, and the reason why humanity has ascended to this position so long time ago already; because the apex predator rules it’s environment with force because it lives by eating the other species. And without ruling the whole planet, it’s completely impossible to even think that a species could attempt to spread out to the stars.
And if we think about the humans, and why it was us that conquered this planet and subjugated all other species as our food and pets, it’s because we are individually relatively weak (compared to other predator species) pack predators, because we are slowly reproducing species whose infants need very much care and instruction, because we are highly adaptible to different climates and diets and because we have hands. Evolving these things forced us to evolve further in to the direction that would seemingly inevitably lead to the throne of this world.
Thus, I strongly suspect that if we ever meet another intelligent species from anothet planet, it’s most likely quite similar to us in the sense that it will most likely have similar background properties that made us to evolve to this point. I don’t believe that it will be submerged species; simply because we have at least three, perhaps even more, very intelligent species in this planet which inhabit water: octopusses, whales and dolphins. Regardless of how intelligent they are, their ability to subjugate nature through technology, and especially the invention fire, is beyond them because they don’t have hands, and they live underwater, where the more refined manipulation of materials is almost impossible. It’s possible that an alien species claiming total domination over it’s own homeworld could be submerged species if it lived in a planet that was completely submerged, but it’s very hard to see them ever developing technology above the very crudest of stone tools, if even that.
So, all in all, as fanciful as the ideas about aliens tend to be, I’m personally quite convinced that every other intelligent species to have created a civilization out there somewhere most likely is a slowly reproducing pack predator, that has hands, and which has developed a technology tree in somewhat similar fashion. Of course, it might not be exactly similar, but if you think how for example the electricity production functions, it’s quite hard to see any being inventing it before inventing the use of fire. Similarly, it’s quite hard to see any being learning metallurgy without fire and multitude of other things. Taming the fire really is quite important step for any kind of biological creature. Other aspect of this is the development of sciences in the first place; most likely any intelligent species out there has developed complex mathematics, simply because without such mathematics, it’s extremely hard to conceive how they could develop many other things which are more or less mandatory to even reach the point where we are now.
The requirement for hands is fine IFF you define it as “appendages capable of firmly grasping and manipulating objects”. Something similar to an octopus’ tentacle could do most things we do with our hands.
Harry Turtledove wrote a short story, “The Road Not Taken”, in which most galactic civilizations stumbled on the secret of gravity control and FTL before anything else. The implications of that lead to a concept of physics that doesn’t include what we consider high technology. As a result, the alien invasion force was confident that Earth couldn’t possibly have anything powerful enough to defeat their starships, with their thick wooden hulls, or the newly-developed blunderbusses. They were horrified when their initial attacks were repulsed by tanks and men in armor, and utterly demoralized by the existence of jet aircraft. Then two of them who had been taken prisoner began to realize they’d brought these people faster-than-light travel…
The Road Not Taken is one of my favorite short stories, and what I also thought of while reading this post.
Thank you for that.
That was a fun story.
I love how in this case, humanity really sounds like the galactic equivalent of 40K Orks.
I’m not sure how they would build starship, telescopes, or computers without ubiquitous fire.
Electricity? Heat without open flames like underwater volcanoes?
Could be they come from a cooler planet with a much higher oxygen % in their atmosphere and so letting things get hot is just downright incredibly risky?
Fire also bakes, and manages land to promote food without the need for husbandry or fences. It can be and has been used in a much more sophisticated manner than we of the west would ever imagine based on our collective narrative of history.
I’d recommend ‘Country’ from the First Knowledges series published by Thames & Hudson Australia. It’s an excellent explanation of how Fire/No Fire was used to actively manage this entire continent we now call Australia.
And I’d be interested to see how that lens might then inform this brilliant sci fi thought experiment.