As is the thumb, does it follow from that that a tentacled animal couldn’t build civilization
No, because a tentacle could serve the same function as a thumb if need be. If you can find something that can perform the same useful tasks as fire, then you will have a defensible point.
Which are?
What exactly does a civilization strictly need out of fire?
Nutrient density (cooking), smelting, warmth in cold weather, internal combustion, purifying water, etc. The most important of those is smelting of course, the others are just extremely beneficial.
Non-hominins can do without, sometimes even with just foliage and other such food
Why do they need that?
Houses, clothes, cuddling, etc
They won’t need that very early on
Most animals do fine with raw water
This is the underwater civ talk all over again
This is going to be closed soon…
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Two of your points mentioned animals, which are very different from humans. The energy we require is massive. Not to mention it is very necessary to be able to make nutrient dense food so specialization can take place. Second, are you arguing that fire isnt necessary at the same time that humans invented it? because i agree with that as i mentioned earlier. Or are you saying that fire is never needed?
I mean… How can an alien species have industrialization without the knowledge of combustion? Let alone getting to space without rockets, so I’d say fire is a requirement. Unless you know how to get to space without the use of either.
Edit: on another note, you argue for us to show proof of those things being necessary, but the same can be said about you showing proof of those not being necessary, so it’s not really a great argument imo. That’s the point of LAWK, it’s kind of hard to say what is and isn’t possible for life/civilization when we have only knowledge of our own.
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I frequently see people assuming the oceans will have shells in them and the lands will have trees. People tend to assume things will be similar on every planet, but that isn’t really the case. Someone could have a world where the lands are covered in shells but the seas have almost no shelled animals.
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I spent way too long writing this 
in a txt file with notepad, It’s some thoughts I wrought out of head in order to find a conclusion to the ‘Fireless civ’ thing blas likes, to at least answer the question to myself, though this may wrong and entirely off base.
1 Human consumes ~2,000 calories a day
therefor, 1 human consumes ~730,000 a year,
with medieval technology, ~2/3rds of all people were farmers, therefor one 1 human can farm ~3,000 calories a day (1,095,000 a year), and it can be assumed to have eaten those calories cooked.
We’ll have to use a ballpark estimate, I would say it is at least 10% more efficient, and not more than 100%, I’ll do all the following calculations at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% to be thorough.
A such a farmer eating his food uncooked would, have his efficiency reduced:
At 25%, they would have 20% less calories, with 876,000 left over.
At 50%, they would have ~33% less calories, with ~729,000 left over.
At 75%, they would have ~43% less calories, with ~625,000 left over.
And at 100%, they would have 50% less calories, with 547,500 left over.
As you can see, if cooking accounts for more than a third of the caloric intake of food, it is impossible to survive by subsistence farming with medieval farming practices, not even mentioning neolithic farming, which may be closer to 3/4th of the population farming, which would make all the above calorie values 16% less. From now onwards, I’ll be assuming the first statistic in all circumstances, this is blatantly incorrect and is actually a minor advantage to fireless civs, and I am not spending another hour working on this.
Obviously all the statistics are somewhat screwy since 2000 a day and all USDA food labels are based on atwater caloric values, but it atleast helps illustrate my point that if cooking provides a 50% or boost to effective calories, it would mean the inverse is impossible; it doesn’t matter in this case that a ‘calorie’ is not the same value as 4184 joules, as it is effectively multiplied by digestion efficiency of cooked food, and then adjusted to find the raw efficiency.
Another thing, the human brain is expensive, between 20% of our energy while resting, and over 30% when in intense thought, taking 25% off the 730,000 statisic gives us only 547,500 calories needed for a braindead human, as I have stated before, the smartest animals are about as smart as a 6 year old, considering human brain develop stops entirely at 25, assuming it scales linearly(It doesn’t), about a quarter the brain power is needed for a smart animal, so giving a quarter of their brain back gives us a statisic of 593,125 calories, which means that even with cooking giving a 75% bonus over raw, they could survive on raw food, but the problem is they now have animal level intelligence.
For completeness:
At 50% percent human brain power, 638,750 are needed,
and at 75%, 684,375 are needed.
So, I’ve established that humans can survive eating cooked food and animals can survive eating raw food, so what? One more tiny problem, as you approach human level intelligence, it is clear that the amount of calories spare becomes more and more scarce, such that a human level intelligence without fire would slowly starve to death unless cooking did have not a significant effect on the caloric value of food. It is also then a question of the minimum intelligence needed for civilization, of which I do not have an answer.
And this only really applies for creatures with similar caloric requirements to humans, I can’t help you with a civilization of mice.
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What’s your evidence? It seems that money is a very natural concept to come to as barter economies cannot scale because it takes a lot of effort to find suitable trades. So eventually trade will settle on a commodity or some rare object to be used as a transfer of value to facilitate very specialist trades between people who don’t have anything to offer to each other but still want something.
This point already got demolished by other people.
It doesn’t. I already knew that we need to also apply ideas to Thrive that haven’t necessarily happened on Earth, but are plausible.
You need to get a truer grasp on how not to belgium off everyone else.
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They can’t but that doesn’t mean they need to know how fire works from day one
There are constraints on what can and can’t evolve: Water can dissolve ions, including calcium ions, which are used to make shells that are much harder to make on land, whereas on land plants need to grow taller to avoid the shadows of other plants, and wood is one of the only good ways to do that with air
And what if they aren’t medieval farmers? If we look at frugivores, then we’d see that the human energy requirements could easily be fulfilled by about 30 medjood dates, or 8 avocados. It seems plausible that such fruits, or at least similarly calorific things, could arise through coevolution, domestication, or a mixture of both
Using dates as a model, then we see that each tree provides around 90-130kg of dates yearly, which is about 4000-5500 individual fruit. This is about 10 fruits a day over the year, or only a third of what one person needs around the year. And given that the fruit may be produced year round, there are no issues with storing it
That doesn’t seem all that absurd to me
Sure, a barter economy won’t work at larger scales, but that isn’t the only alternative to currency. Consider a communal system, where people simply do what needs done for the sake of getting it done. Where would the currency come in there? You could also have a system where the rulers simply make everyone else work as slaves, with the flow of goods and services mapped out by the leaders
You should keep insults down and avoid them. He didnt insult you or anyone here.
Yes humans had access to all those things before fire. But fire made them even EASIER to access. Which made it easier for humans to generally live. The purifying food and water gave humans much healthier foor which made a big positive impact for them. Also fire enabled humans to stay awake more during the night and freed up time, which in turn led to more thinking and planning.
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If we look at frugivores, then we’d see that the human energy requirements could easily be fulfilled by about 30 medjood dates, or 8 avocados.
There’s a fallacy in the reasoning: you just can’t expect people to eat high-energy food, because you need other nutrients. If you want your super-fruit to have everything, it will diminish the overall quantity you get (because it would get bigger and thus take longer to grow). It will also, I guess, be more exposed to spoiling, and all this is of course assuming you can get such kind of super-fruit to start with.
Secondly, these fruits grow under specific climates, which makes it a disadvantage for a species reliant on them. If such a society without farmers ever emerges (which probably happened in human history), it will be tied to these climates. It would thus be at a disadvantage against more flexible societies that do have farmers.
And said agricultural societies would have a large demographical advantage, because trees take some space, which would limit the population you could feed.
Also, another issue with your argument is that you compare modern frugivores (who, I guess generally do have so-called intellectual jobs), and thus have a lesser physical activity. Even though their jobs may be called “intellectual”, it remains to be shown that they use significantly more brain energy (especially, farmers probably mobilize a decent share of their sensory-motor cortices when working, not to mention that they obviously don’t plant seed at randoms either, e.g.). Furthermore, some research argues that our brains have been diminishing in size since the early times of agriculture. Since we probably didn’t have a significant diminution of body size since then, our brain-to-body ratio diminished, and thus arguably our energy consumption (which may be linked to the use of external cognition, e.g. writing instead of memorizing). Whichever way, we probably consume less energy than our ancestors.
As a final note, some food fo thought: if we have such fruits that are so wonderful at sustaining a population (a huge advantage), how come societies having access to them didn’t take over the others?
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And they can get these other nutrients from other foodstuffs. I was just discussing energy constraints. Either way, raiding another 3-4 trees per person daily isn’t going to push their society to collapse
If these other groups can survive on farming then so can the original group, which invalidates the point I was responding to
I don’t really understand this, could you explain please?
Humans have fire and aren’t frugivores
I think this is just gonna keep going in circles
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This you?
Since fire it’s needed to make advanced technology and fire itself it’s a very usefull technology, the only civilizations that wouldnt have it would be very early in the story of their species.
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I’ll close the thread after this revolutionary discovery that after all @BurgeonBlas admits, in some sense of the word, that there’s really good reasons why things have happened the way they have.
And trying to prove civilizations without using fire is even a worse thing than underwater civilizations.
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