Would such civs be more plausible than plant civs still?
1 Like
I wouldn’t say so, under most conditions. The problem with plant civs is the lack of evolutionary pressure for a plant to become sapient, while iron civs realistically seem to require something driving many things to use iron respiration, which is very inefficient. Maybe a planet that can’t retain a significant atmosphere would make this plausible, but then they can’t get fire.
2 Likes
Hm.
Also I find it kind of funny that the reason why underwater civs can’t become industrial is that they live in an environment not suited for post-society stage level development, whilst plants are in an environment where they could make fire and stuff if the evolution paved a way for them to interact with the areas around them more, but they lack pressure for the said evolution to manifest itself; In other words, one could argue underwater civs are the inverse of plants civs and vice versa.
That’s a good point. In macroscopic, digestive enzymes could be released at short range to ingest food through the skin. But this would be inefficient unless you are pressed against what you are feeding on. So, there would be a pressure to develop a way to cling to objects, or to develop a cavity to internalise the process.
Probably not just feeding on iron. The larger the species get, the larger the range of additional resources they’d need. Though they could potentially have symbiotic relationships to recycle the iron. Maybe a terrestrial iron-eating species could have a sort of fungus that reduces iron and stores it, thereby becoming a much more effective food source than mining for and chewing on rocks.
3 Likes
With the symbiotic ironeater, could such an organism get to awakening without needing extra food sources?
1 Like