A World Before Fire: The Terrestrial Anomaly

was it like to be on planet Earth? And and you always see the like the volcanoes and they've like caught right in the middle of an illustration some kind of meteor bombardment, you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, Yeah, there's always some sort of cataclysmic scenario going on, you know, something that makes for a nice painting other than just say,

you know, a dead sea. Yeah. And in the really early ones where you see the Earth as a kind of primordial landscape, there is very often I have found on a red orange tint to them, you know what I'm talking about, Yeah, Like they paint the Earth at that period as a world of fire like that at one point, Earth was how we imagine hell yeah, you know, I believe the the original Fantasia film has a as a segment in there which is sort of the primordial

Earth that invokes some of this sort of imagery sort of red orange. I think, so that may be a little more technicolor huge, but but I think there's some orangine. Never sure as if there's like an off screen fire that's illuminating everything gels. But so I want to go back to say, okay, let's look at what we do know about the geological history of the Earth and try to paint a picture of the landscape from say, you know,

maybe some early part of the Archean eon. So going way, way way back, if you were wells time traveler in the time machine and you accidentally you know, you know, I don't lean your leg up against the dial, and I went back all the way, what would it be like. Well, first of all, we're gonna be talking about a time when the Earth has a very different atmospheric composition. So it's got a reducing atmosphere with almost no significant amount

of free oxygen gas. And if you look across the landscape, you're going to see a lot of rocks, but you are not going to see visible plants or animals. Because the land part of the Earth has not been colonized by life. You're gonna see a hot, barren, rocky landscape. But there is life in this period. So where's the life. Well, if you go to the coastal regions, you might see these strange vertical bulbs protruding up out of the tidal pools around the Rocky coast and they're like black brains

that are just jutting up out of the surf. These are the stramatolites. Have you seen these roberts? I don't think I've seen an image of this now. Oh yeah, so some of them still exist on Earth today. You can look at things that there were probably things very much like the stramatellites. Just Google image search. It is pretty cool. They're little black brains coming up out of

the water. And these are these crazy bio sedimentary structures made by mats of of cyanobacteria, you know, these these small, tiny photosynthetic organisms trapping grains of minerals to build these bacterial mountain bulbs. And it's probably hot. It's probably hot out, but if you think about it, this is a world completely without fire. Yeah, there's no fire on planet Earth. And it's not just in a sense of like, oh, there are no there are no people having camp fires,

there's no there's no there's no fire to be maintained. No, this is a time when Earth was a a fireless world, like fire was not possible. It was a time before fire. Yeah, so you can create some some very hot scenes in this geological period, but there's not going to be any ignition. There will be no fire on planet Earth at this period. Yeah. It's immordial as fire is to us. It's it's it's it's just mind boggling to think back on a time when it didn't exist. It was it's almost as if

it had not been invented yet. Yeah, and that's crazy, because how could there be a world without fire. Fire is not like an invention of human beings as as you just alluded to. It's a natural product of chemistry. It seems like it's should be something that's just universal. There should be fire everywhere, right, it's physics and chemistry. But I guess we should look at what it takes to make a fire. Yeah, so most people are probably

familiar with this. You have a have three prerequisites for fire, the fire pyramid, the fire fire triangle. Yeah, when we were researching this, I found some rather elaborate ways to say, hey, the stuff that makes a fire. Uh so you gotta have your heat obviously, that's one's that's one line. You've got to have your fuel. Another, what is burning? You gotta have something that burns, and you have to have

oxygen for that fire to consume oxidizer. Yeah. So one of the things that you can see from this, though, is that fire is the interaction of these three elements. It's not so much a thing in itself as it is an event or a process. It's an interaction between these three elements. And that's kind of counterintuitive to us because like when you carry a torch and it feels

like you're carrying a substance of something somewhere. Yeah, you don't think of it as is the same as being a sayn explosion, which of course is also a chemical reaction, but it's more of an instantaneous effect. A fire is almost you can almost think of it as a as an explosion and slow motion or something like that. You know, it's a but but since it takes place over time, we think of it as a thing as a substance, right, But it is an interaction. So let's look a little

deeper at this interaction. What happens when a fire starts? Well, you know, it comes back to those three ingredients we're talking about. Uh, and it's interesting to to break down each of those and get where they come in to the long deep history of planet Earth. Okay, Well, one source is heat. That's not really a problem, right, That's

never really been a problem obviously on the planet. Um, you know, a sparkle do it, Lightning strikes, Volcanic activity is sparking rocks like one rock falling down, scraping another one, Um, that sort of thing, meteorites, all of these have taken place throughout Earth's deep history. So that's that's never been We've never wanted for heat. Okay, so we've got heat, But what about the other two planks oxygen and fuel? Was we alluded to earlier? You had a different atmosphere

back exactly? Yeah, Uh, it wasn't until five hundred and forty million years ago, that's the beginning of the Paleozoic era, that the photosynthetic organisms essentially terraformed the planet's atmosphere into an oxygenated balance, capable of providing the necessary the necessary second ingredient for fire, that being oxygen. Right, they did to Earth what what we might want to do to Mars in a thousand years or something. Yeah, transformed, it

changed its atmosphere through some chemical engineering. And uh, and one thing you might have noticed is, and when I was painting the picture earlier, you know, I said, we had some photosynthetic organisms, but we didn't really have an oxygen atmosphere yet. It took a while, right, So, photosynthetic organisms appeared, and they were creating some oxygen, but for a long time it seemed like oxygen was accumulating in the oceans or sort of reacting with stuff on the

surface of the Earth and oxidizing it. But over time we did start to build up a serious oxygen atmosphere. And uh, this didn't go so well for a lot of organisms, right, yeah, yeah, I mean it was an apocalypse. Everything became great poison of everything that came before. But you know, okay, so so at this point, we've got our we've got our heat, and we finally have our oxygen available, and this of course brings us to fuel what is actually going to burn yeah, you can't burn rocks, right,

have you ever tried? That doesn't work out? So well, Uh, this is actually the last ingredient. They became available for hire since you've got to have a terrestrial plant matter that builds up and you know, is burnable, and terrestrial plant matter was scarce in this early age. In fact, the earliest evidence of charred vegetation dates back a mere four hundred and forty million years ago. That's not that

long ago, I mean geologically speaking. So that's the evidence, of course, right, But so if the Earth has been here four point five billion years and so it's only been within the last billion years that we have evidence of fire on Earth. But then it took off after that, because we'll be exploring it got huge. It's really big. Yeah, it became a rather big deal. Um. It came to define the new Earth. You had geologic ages in which fluctuating oxygen levels contributed to the rise and fall of

terrestrial burn rates. Um. And then and of course the humans eventually came along. They took a shine to fire, and the rest is history. You know. I think it's interesting to think about Earth as the fire planet, right, because where where else in the universe, do we know for sure there is fire? It is my understanding that there is nowhere else in the universe that we know

for sure has fire. Now, there could be fire, there could be, but what you would need that triangle you'd write the fuel, you'd need the oxidizer or the oxygen, and you need the heat and that just I don't know of anywhere else other than Earth that you have all three of those things, right we Yeah, we do not know of a place that has fire other than the Earth right now. Maybe out there many people believe it exists, but for now, there is no such thing

as extraterrestrial fire. You know, they call Earth the water planet, but this makes me think that we should also think of it as the fire planet. I mean, fire seems

even more unique to Earth than water does. There's water ice on plenty of other planets or moons and stuff in the Solar system, right And of course one can certainly imagine a water world in which fire is possible, but even more rare because if you just have oceans, if you don't have we well just to wet, or if you don't have plenty of dried materials around, they're gonna they're gonna be able to fill that uh that the third notch on the ingredients list, then it's not

gonna happen. Yeah. This also makes me think about how the atmospheric composition and just the basic nature of a planet create the environment under which fire can arise. But also it sort of turns the knobs, right, It's not just like you can have fire or you can't. Fire is a chemical reaction, and chemical reactions tend to be uh, they tend to be degrees of susceptibility to them, right, Like you can increase all of the catalytic conditions that

make this chemical reaction right to take place. So, for example, uh, can you imagine a science fiction story? Can you imagine? Of course you can. You have a great imagination. Let's imagine the science fiction story where space space explorers they're flying around, they're looking for a safe planet they can land end on with a breathable atmosphere because they're having engine trouble or something, and the only planet nearby is

this planet that has an oxygen atmosphere. But they sat down and they realized, whoa, it's got a really oxygen rich atmosphere. So not just oxygen, but much higher concentrations of oxygen than we're used to in Earth's atmosphere today. And then let's also say it's got high temperature, is in low moisture, you could actually have a sort of maximally flammable planet, right because it would be Yeah, for the same reason one does not smoke while using an

oxygen mask, exactly. Yeah. And also for the same reason that you can see tragedies in like NASA history for example, So you know the crew deaths during testing for the Apollo one mission. They were during testing for this mission, they were they were trying to test the capsule for liftoff,

and there was a cabin fire. It was probably ignited by a spark from some bad wiring, but the problem was that the capsule was filled with pure oxygen environment, which combined with the high pressure and then the presence of flammable materials in the cabin meant that any fire could just completely easily rage out of control in a in a heartbeat. And that's exactly what happened, and it killed the three astronauts while they were testing on in

January nine seven. Then that was grisome, white and chaffey, and so you can imagine in a in a whole planet like this, if like your whole planet's atmosphere is somewhere closer to what it was like in that Apollo one test cabin. That's not that's not an easy place to live, right, and to the environment, right, wander around like, am I afraid of dropping a tool and accidentally causing

a spark? And you'd have to also be careful way for your compost, that's, of course, because that's another way that you can have a combustion, the sort of spontaneous combustion that occurs certainly with compost hay bales, but arguably with people as well. Uh, spontaneous seeming combustion, which is another topic. Wait, Robert, you've got to give me the straight on this. Okay, spontaneous human combustion. Is it real or not? It's been a while since I researched it.

We have, we have an older episode on it, which I can link to on the landing page for this episode. As I recall, it is certainly possible, but it gets difficult when you look at individual instances because a lot of times there are other explanations that could could be

in place. Yeah, I remember some skeptical takes, at least thinking that I'd come across people saying, you know, almost all these cases can be explained just by people accidentally setting fire their clothes, smoking in this sort of thing. Um as I recall, though there are some there are some theories for how it could take, how it could occur, had it. But it's kind of a case by case situation though. So if it can happen with fertilizer, could

happen with us. Yeah, if your body is enough like fertilizer, then you then then then you could go up like a torch. I think my body is much like fertilizer. All right, we're gonna do a quick break and when we come back, we're going to discuss how fire shaped life on Earth. I want to position yourself for career success. Master the Fundamentals of Business with hb X Core, a three course online program developed by Harvard Business School faculty.

Immerse yourself in real world case studies as you dive and do business analytics, Economics for Managers, and financial accounting. The three courses that Harvard Business School faculty determined we're essential to becoming fluent in the language of business. The innovative HBX online platform was developed from the ground up to foster real time peer to peer engagement and interaction.

Complete the coursework on your own time while meeting regular deadlines, network with a global cohort of peers, and earn a credential from hb X and Harvard Business School. After successful completion of the program, boost your resume, grow your network, and advance your career with the hb X Core Credential from hb X and Harvard Business School. To learn more,

visit about hb X dot com slash how Stuff Works. Okay, we're back, so today in this episode, we're gonna be referring to this excellent two thousand nine paper from Bioscience called a Burning Story, which would be a great Pixar movie. But it's a Burning Story call and the Role of Fire in the History of Life by Julie GI Pausas and John E. Keiley, and I want to start with a quote that they have from their paper that they write quote, A world without fires is like a sphere

without round nous. That is, we cannot imagine it. Wildfires have shaped our world since long before humans emerged. We cannot understand our biota and biota means all of the biomass that makes up a certain area, you know, all all of the life there. They say, we cannot understand our biota in terms of adaptations and ecosystem distribution without including fire as a process in the natural history of

the planet. So they're they're saying fire is not just something that happens occasionally and you know it's suddenly like, oh there's a fire, freak out, got a run from it. They're they're casting fire more as a very standard, regular part of Earth life that shaped the life forms that exist on the planet today. Yeah, because they think back to the three ingredients, think back to the the the

ways that those things occur um. So you have lightning strikes, meteorites, et cetera, volcanic activity, these are all things that can that can and do touch off natural wildfires, and so periodic wildfires in the exact um you know, the schedule of the wildfires, the exact regime of the wildfires, which we'll get into a bit, will vary, but you're going to have whole ecosystems that evolve with fire being in play.

Now on our planet. It's important to note there is no such thing as a fireproof organism, and certainly we have some wonderful examples of creatures in sci fi and fantasy that you know that roll aroun sound in fire, or particularly thinking of in Dungeons and Dragons, you have, you know, an entire plane of fire, and they're all these like salamander like beings that live there and fire elementals. But life as we know it here on Earth is not so rugged. Now I'm trying to think what that

would even be. Let's let's cut out the magic, no Dungeons and Dragons stuff. No, no, no dark curses or protections, just biologically. Could there be an organism that survives in fire. I don't really see how that would happen, unless maybe if it's something kind of like a weird like combination of a turtle and like B B eight from the Force awakened, so it's like a shell all around with maybe some holes that it can slide open and close

or something. Yeah. I mean, we certainly have species that are fire resistant, and we have plenty of species that are able to to varying degrees game wildfires and certainly exploit the benefits of wildfire fires. But we haven't We have nothing that is fireproof. Nothing that that that that is not destroyed by the flame, its flame is present in sufficient amounts, right exactly, So fire excites molecules. The

structure of our molecules is rather important to us. You'd have to find some organism to which I guess it's surrounded by molecules that can be burned and don't really matter fire. And this is important for the ways that humans use fire, Like fire breaks things down, Fire changes the chemistry of things. Uh and uh and and it's

we're just not I mean, we're just highly susceptible to that. Nevertheless, the the fire world is a real part of the world, and it's something that all kinds of organisms have come up with these adaptations too. So like, like we said, there's no fireproof organism, but what does it mean to be a fire resistant organism? Okay? Well, one example that

often comes up or sequoias. Okay, So, so some plant species actually depend on fire is part of the reproductive cycle, while some simply evolved long ago to weather regular wildfires. So some can get through it, right. Uh. Sequoia seeds, for example, actually remain dormant until fire breaks down the outer coating as such a good control. Burn can can also aid the environment by stimulating local vegetation. Um, you know.

And on on top of this, you have a situation where the fire is going to uh, it's not going to burn down the larger plants in the various forest environments are just gonna be scorched. And yes, some will succumb, but for the most part, it's gonna be the smaller things that get burned away, the undergrowth, and then that opens up that area for new vegetation to move in.

It also allows various animals new opportunities to thrive. So it it's a dynamic aspect of of many different environments and and it's not just limited like it's easy to think, oh, well, you know, like California dry hills or grasslands, and certainly those are areas dry areas with vegetation are going to be very susceptible to wildfire. But wildfire also exists in tropical jungle environments. There are plenty of examples of that.

Because those areas are gonna have dry spells as well, there's gonna be combustible materials, and therefore it's a part of those environments is as well. Yeah, totally you see it in grasslands, you see it in savannahs. There is such a thing as desert fire. And also one of the things about fire on earth is that wildfires trigger cycles of wildfires. Fire begets fire in a certain way because, for one thing, you can look at how fire prevents

bigger fires. This makes any sense, there's another reason for control burns, Yeah, exactly. So, like small fires in a certain area will clean out the underbrush, you know, dry vegetation near the ground that if allowed to grow unchecked by fire, could eventually lead to larger fires that actually catch you know, the crowns of trees on fire, and

those become very hot and spread very uncontrollably. Yeah, it's there was There was certainly a time in like forest management and agriculture where I think we we just we just said, Okay, fires are bad, We're gonna we're gonna cut them out wherever possible. But yeah, you just you just destabilize the natural environment and the environment's ability to

roll with periodic wildfires. And on the subject of periodic wildfires, we mentioned regimes of fire rightlier, and that's a that's a great term, yeah, because it sounds like, you know, fire demons ruling them a broken world, a new flaming king since to the throne of coals. Yeah, yeah, that's some dark imagery, Joe. But but it's a good day for that sort of thing. Um. Yeah, So you have you have a single forest fire that's an event, just a fire event, but then a series of fires over time.

That's a fire regime, and that a fire regime. That is what organisms evolve to roll with, not an individual fire, but but regimes of fire. It's sort of like how organisms are not going to be adapted to an individual storm, but they will be adapted to the local climate, right. Yeah, And of course the regimes are gonna vary in some areas, some areas gonna be more prone to wildfires than others, as we discussed, because you're talking about about the various

factors here. Human agriculture of course alters the situation somewhat. You have interactions of humidity, conditions, fuels, ignition sources. All these determined the particular regions fire regime. You also have to take into account topography and wind, like what's gonna how are those going to affect the spread of the flames. And certainly I think any of our listeners who live in more in places where wildfires are more of a regular concern um. And so we think about California, Arizona,

places like that. You know, you're gonna be far more familiar with these realities than than a lot of our listeners. You know, one of the craziest looking wildfires I've ever seen was from some footage I saw of wildfire in Australia. Have you ever seen video of like the the Australian fire storms and like Canberra? Oh? I don't think I have.

Oh man, it's otherworldly. It does not look like Planet Earth where it is like those old illustrations from the previous geological areas where the entire sky is orange and like flames and sparks are just whipping around in the wind. It is unreal. You should look that up. Fun fact. I bring up Ian and Banks a lot in his Culture series of novels because he always has some fabulous sci fi visions that he's discussing being a technology or

certainly visions of alien life in alien worlds. And in his just absolutely excellent book The Player of Games, Uh, there is a there's a planet that pops into it since it's a it's a water world. So you just have this ring of land with this constant fire that moves all the way around it, and it's an essential part of the of of the the eco system. So if the fire were to get put out, that seems like that could just be like the end of life

terrestrial life on this planet. Yeah. Yeah, it's like this alien vision on It is even more dependent on fire than anything we could, you know, experience here on Earth. But it serves as a kind of an interesting model too, to exemplify the importance of wildfires in our own ecosystem, to say that, yes, they do occur, and they and in the appropriate cycles, they play an important role. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come

back there will be more about alien worlds and fire. Hey. I'm Chuck and I'm Josh and we're the host of Stuff you should know the podcast, that's right, And if you're into understanding cool and unusual and seemingly ordinary and even boring things that are made interesting, you should check us out. Please and thank you. We're on iTunes, Spotify,

Google Play Music, anywhere you get podcasts. All right, we're back, Okay, Robert, I have a question for you because thinking about alien worlds and fire and the fact that we live on the only fire world, and the fact that we know of a time in the history of the Earth where fire was not possible on this planet was just chemically not going to happen. Um, my question is could technological

civilization arise on a planet that doesn't permit fire? So we think about um, other planets and other other biologies were always considering this. You know, we're like, oh, you know, our closed minds. We think everybody's got to be like us in the universe in order to have some kind

of technological intelligence. Maybe our our minds are not too closed, Maybe they're too open when we're trying to imagine, uh, you know, powerful alien technologies, aliens with spaceships and radio transmitters and stuff like that, arising on planets that have different atmospheric compositions, or might be water worlds or something like that. Because I just started to think, how on

Earth could we put on Earth it not intended? How could we possibly have generated tech knowledgy on this planet without the chemical readiness to create fire in our atmosphere? Just imagine the life forms that arise on a planet with a non oxygen atmosphere and no other gases that could play the role of an oxidizer. First of all, you've got the question about how how would they cook food and stuff like that, And actually, we're gonna do this is gonna be a two part episode about fire.

In the second episode, we're gonna talk more about the ideas of how cooking informed the intelligent beings we became. But also here's a maybe even a much bigger one. What about smelting or to create metal tools? Like, how do you create metal tools without fire? You might be sitting there thinking for a second, like, well, you know, there's other hot things, and uh, really, what else could you use? What are you saying you would stand over a volcano and somehow find a way to use that

to create metal tools? I mean it is it starts becoming very difficult trying to figure out how you would do this. And then without metal old tools, could you actually expect discoveries of things like electricity, optics, fundamental forces. Um So, it just made me wonder, well, is there any non fire equivalent? Is there a margarine of fire

in the chemistry that's available to this universe? You know, is there some other universal exothermic chemical reaction, a reaction that puts off heat that that can be transported around as easily as fire and started as easily as fire. Yeah, I don't know. It's easy to think of various sci fi visions of sort of you know, organic purely organic

species that have organic spaceships and organic technology. And you know, I'm not totally discounting that vision, but when you start breaking it down and look at look at the only model we have for technological ascension, that the role of fire just cannot be divided front it right, Yeah, we're forcing one of the scenarios where we just we cannot envision or it's very difficult to envision another system that works.

You know, I did think of one example, one counterexample for cooking, and it's when when Rachel and I were in Iceland. We were we went to a little town called hivera Garthy where they have a basket that you can boil an egg and well it's not boiled, where you can steam an egg by putting in a in a basket that hangs over a geothermal vent. This team

comes out of Yeah, I can see that working. I thought you were going to go with the other like fermentation methods of preparing food, because certainly you can make an argument there, right, oh yeah, yeah, but that's that's not cooking. Well, it's in a way it's cooking. It's a it's it's cuisine. It's cuisine. Yeah, but yeah, it's

it's reatherly different from cooking. I guess. Uh. So we were talking about this the other day and we're and we were looking around and thinking, you know, somebody, somebody has to have tackled this. There has to be a scientist out there who's really gone in deep on this question of technological without fire. No, I I gotta say, Robert, this is all you. I had no idea anybody would

have written on this. Well, uh yeah, because I was surprised, pleasantly surprised to find this a wonderful article by a scientist by the name of Michael D. Swords. Swords Like the Weapon right, uh, is titled could extraterrestrial intelligences be expected to breathe Our air? And it was published in

a edition of the Journal of Scientific Exploration. Okay, now we should put up a big skeptics asterisk here and say that the Journal of Scientific Exploration is a publication that deals with friends fringe science like u apology and the paranormal, the horizons of science, as they would put it. Yes, and it has been accused by critics of promulgating pseudoscience. I don't know how to adjudicate that here, But we don't want to give the impression of an endorsement in

general of this journal or its contents. Uh just put up this big red asterisk on the credentials of the journal in general. But we do want to talk about this one very interesting and at least seemingly solid paper. Yeah. And and likewise, Sword himself is certainly no pure skeptic either. He uh is was an editor for the journal. If you have a UFO Studies board member of the J.

Allen Heineck Center for UFO Studies. Uh So, he's very much a man who wants to believe he's retired now, but at the time of this publication he was with Western Michigan University. Uh and uh and and yeah, I think that the paper itself, though, so a gainfully employed scholars right right. So this is not like a guy in a cabin somewhere writing about UFOs. This is this is a and this was. And also it's worth pointing out this again, this is a pure of view journal,

you know, for what it's worth. But again, when you when you look at the actual paper, I think the paper holds up pretty well. Well yeah, well, let's let's see what it says. Being judged for yourself. All right. So, Swords, whose doctorate studies are centered around the history of technology, points out in this article that the essential nature of fire is often overlooked by academics. He said, quote, the role of fire is partially obvious and maybe not so obvious.

The maybe not is the necessar city of fire control fire to manipulate materials and break them down into their elemental components. Breaking materials down is the road, the only road to establishing material technology that makes sense to me. I think that's in line with what I was just saying. Yeah.

He mentions that the critics of this only road approach that insisted there are alternatives such as depending on additive approaches uh, the addition of one substance to another components elements, alloys, etcetera. As a means up for new material science is without fire. Wait, how would you create alloys without fire? Well, that's the that's the argument point, isn't it. Uh So this is this is how he responds to those critics, he says, and he has some wonderful vinegar here to his response.

He says, I am open to someone demonstrating this sort of non fire based material science. But where these components, elements and alloys will originally come from without fire somewhere down the road remains a complete puzzle to me. It is in the breakage, manipulation and recombination of materials that one achieves achieves metallurgy, much of chemistry, glass technology, polymers, etcetera. Without fire leading to metals technology, there is no control electricity,

no electric age, and certainly no nuclear age. Yeah. That that's a totally different thing here too. Uh. Nuclear age makes me think about the energy we use to power our society, not just the creation of tools, but we depend on on free access to two easy energy for everything that makes modern life, you know, easily livable and modern science easy to do with all the equipment and electronics and stuff like that we have. Uh, in a

world without that, what would your energy source be? I mean, I guess you could have I don't know, hydroelectric dams. But if you don't have metals to conduct, I don't know. I mean, yeah, I'm I'm I'm at a loss. Yeah. He kind of summarizes this all by saying, all technology on a fireless world would be the simple utilization of what nature gives one, an almost passive interaction. Fire is the gate to the possibility of high technology, the only gate.

So so the idea is that certainly you could have individuals finding stuff, exploiting natural environments, boiling their fish and event or what have you. But can they actually make anything? Can they actually achieve high technology? Can they build a spaceship or say even a toaster? Uh? The argument Swords would make is no, and he sort of And he also goes on to sort of challenge anyone out there show me an idea that's not complete, like fantasy, fantasy sci fi. Uh, and I will accept it, but I

haven't seen it yet. Well, I guess for me, the question would be looking at chemistry. I mean, I was trying to find is there an example of something else

like fire? Again, with fire not being a substance so much as a chemical reaction and interaction or process, is there another universal exother chemical reaction you could come up with where well, if you mix heat and these other two readily available types of substances, you will get an easy to produce chemical reaction that heats things up, and you can do it almost anytime anywhere on the planet. I don't know, I don't know of any evidence of

what that would be, but perhaps there is such a thing. Yeah, he he goes on in his paper to say, I mean, basically, you need to have that free oxygen um. You know you can. You can. There their arguments for other combustion supporters, chlorine and other halogens, mainly, he says, but but really you keep coming back to the necessity for oxygen. Now.

He also brings up we mentioned sea worlds earlier, the other water world or whatever you want to call them, um, And in the past episode we tried to imagine this too. If you had like a dolphin race on a on a on a water world, would they be capable of achieving technology? Would mermaids be able to build your soul like a like a race of intelligent dolphin creatures, not like a dolphin race, like they're trying to get to

the finish. No, no, not not a not not a race in that sense, but but powerful civilization, right, yeah, would that be possible? Or mermaids or deep ones or whatever a vision of undersea life you want to toy with here, Cathulhu has no technology. Yeah, I mean that would be the argument here, because this is what what

old Mike Swords has to say. He says, for those who suggest that an alternative world not caring about such wildfires because it was all oceanic is a possibility for a high oxygen atmosphere, I say the idea is clever, but all wet. The technological life form needs to control fire where it lives. Underwater seems a poor combustion environment. Occasional fire seeking dog paddling at the surface seems worse.

We need a land animal, and we therefore need a well behaving atmosphere with oxygen in a controlled fire zone. So that kind of that that kind of underlines it rather well, I think. Okay, Well, so it seems like doctor Swords here is agreeing with our intuitions about the necessity of fire for the development of technological civilization. But I still I would like to hear arguments to the contrary. I haven't found any. I don't know if you did not run across any other in any other voices on this.

But yeah, if y'all out there have any have any great ideas about how no, here's the way they could do it, Here's how you could make metal tools without fire, I would love to hear them. Yeah, I'm fascinated, and I don't think uh Swords has necessarily dropped the final word here, But but so far I remained with my mind unchanged. Uh. And certainly there have to be some great examples from sci fi out there as well, varying levels of you know, scientific authenticity, But I'd love to

love to hear those models. Okay, I mentioned this earlier in the episode, I think, but this is actually going to be part one of a two part episode we're doing about the scientific history of fire, where this time we tried to look at a little bit more at the chemistry of the world, the atmosphere, possibilities on a on a no oxygen planet, and how fires shaped life. But next time we are going to be turning our eye to the world of the human, the divine spark,

and what fire means for human life. In the meantime, be sure to check out stuff to blow your mind dot com. That's where we'll find all the podcast episodes, blog post videos, links out to our various social media

accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram, and more. And as always, if you want to get in touch with us directly with feedback about this episode or any other, or with a great idea about how aliens on an oxygen free, fireproof world can make some exothermic reactions and get some swords maybe or other metal metal tools, you can email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and bathands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. Y f F Far Far far f