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Comment by ProjectArcturis | Hacker News Reader

The author's hypothetical octopus "civilization" lacks most of the characteristics we associate with civilization. He seems to assume that agriculture, in the sense of pastoralism, is the only criterion. If this is the case, then ants have been running aphid-farming civilizations for millions of years. Leaf-cutter ants have run fungus farms as well.

I wouldn't be at all surprised that octopi and many other animals have loose farming-like behaviors. This is a far cry from what we generally mean by civilization.

In particular, I believe the domestication of fire is the dividing line between humans and animals. This tool provides access to an enormous new source of energy, which opened a myriad of possibilities unavailable to animals. The tool use and motor skills needed to build, maintain, and use fire probably was a significant stimulus to human brain development.

Cephalopods, of course, would have no opportunity to master fire.

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It's not any particular technical development that separates humans from other animals, but the human relationship to technology as such. Humans only live by way of inserting external objects between themselves and nature, and they do this in an open-ended way. One could also talk about human self-domestication, and agriculture as a self-expanding ecosystem... Fire doesn't really capture the way humans actively modify their own conditions of life.

Why fire? Why is that so different from other tools that require significant effort to create?

Some animals use some tools, but mostly just sticks IIRC, with no effort to creating them, beyond breaking one off a tree. Maybe the criterion 'spend a lot of effort to create a tool' is the criterion, since having the time to spend on tool making requires someone else to get food for you etc. so is that getting towards a civilization?

Why fire? Because, as the GP said, it lets you use energy that isn't your own physical, biological energy. It lets you "level up" in a way that a muscle-powered tool doesn't.

What they didn't say: It also lets you smelt metals. That lets you build much better tools.

Also fire will be a great help in figuring out other chemistry.

There's a hypothetical alternate path where you build the "head end" of civilization using advanced biotechnology, synthetic organism, fermentation, 3-d printing and such. It's an attractive path for human space colonists but how would you figure out the genetic code without metal, glass, computers and such?

I think that we're kind of biased about these sort of things due to the limitations that evolution has placed on most animals.

We take for granted that we cannot regrow lost limbs or direct individual cells to grow into arbitrary organs as directed by our brains because we can't do it but there's no intrinsic biological reason why that must be so.

In a hypothetical first contact situation with intelligent life as we know it they may find it absurd that we can't do those things and wonder how we reached the technological level that we have despite having to spend so many resources on hospitals, work place safety and mechanical R&D instead of just growing what we need what we need it.

Our understanding of things like metal, glass, and computers would be totally different and far more implicit if we could simply grow organs or organisms that produce things for us on a molecular level if evolution had granted our brains the ability to control individual cells of our body.

If a species were committed to very long survival or space travel there is a good chance, I think, they would consider making changes to their own biology.

For instance most of the places that are "habitable" in this universe are on water moons or outer solar system/interstellar bodies that have water inside because of pressure and tidal and geothermal heating. A motivated enough race could create some species (is this the right language?) that would represent itself to take advantage of these sorts of habitats.

Yeah I think that's where we're going too. Just like multicellular organisms are metaorganisms that bring all the advantages that this entails the next level will be metaspecies.

It's going to be really fascinating when we unlock the true power of single cells and an individual can use those cells to generate any sort of body type that they want or any sort of complex structure to build things out of.

Imagine structures built out of bone or enamel. It sounds kind of crazy but it isn't, We already build structures out of wood and we insulate them with wool or down.

Until the industrial age, I think fire was less about having more energy to work with and more about things that could never be done with any amount of mechanical power: heat, light, cooking and all its many benefits, repelling nocturnal predators, and transforming available materials in many useful ways (including smelting but also e.g. fire-hardened wood).

It did also replaced mechanical energy in some ways, e.g. hollowing out bowls or canoes, primitive mining by using large fires to crack rock faces. But I feel like those are less transformative than the other effects.

> This tool provides access to an enormous new source of energy, which opened a myriad of possibilities unavailable to animals.

I'm not going to stand by that reasoning personally, but it's a pretty distinct change in kind.

Because with a small amount of your own energy as input, you unlock vast amounts of potential chemical energy. No other tool used by other animals comes anywhere close in terms of efficiency. And no other animal is anywhere near as "civilized" (loaded term, I know) as humans are.

It is clear there is something different between humans and all other animals. And one obvious difference is mastery of fire.

> Maybe the criterion 'spend a lot of effort to create a tool' is the criterion, since having the time to spend on tool making requires someone else to get food for you etc.

Which would probably never have occurred in humans without mastery of fire. I think that mastery of fire is the common precursor of any trait you could point to as the defining feature of civilization.

Now it's possible we will find unambiguous traits of "civilization" among some other species that hasn't mastered fire (whether here on Earth or elsewhere), but until then I do believe that it is a prerequisite.

I don’t remember exactly where I read it (might have been here), but Margaret Mead is quoted as saying that the earliest sign of civilization, was a long-healed femoral fracture, in an ancient skeleton. In nature, that kind of injury is a death sentence. It meant that the injured person was taken care of, long enough to heal.

Maybe we’ll find fossils, with healed “death sentence” injuries.

If anyone had ever read Lovecraft’s The Mountains of Madness, he posited a different theory about Cretaceous civilizations.

I'd take this with a grain of Silurian Salt, but there is some fossil evidence that a Tyrannosaurus Rex or two healed from injuries significant enough that surviving them would almost require help from somebody.

The fossil of Barbara[0] "shows a particularly bad break, which goes right through the site of the tendon attachment, so most probably the tendon would have been torn off the bone [...]" If you're a very large two-legged creature a break like that could be a death sentence, but the fossilized break shows signs of healing.

Sue[1] is one of the most famous T. Rex fossils and she shows many healed injuries including broken bones and bacterial infections. It's highly possible that her species is just incredibly tough, but it's also possible that they took care of each other to some degree.

[0] https://www.iflscience.com/meet-barbara-the-pregnant-t-rex-w...

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1393-sue-postmortem-r...

Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps these T-Rexes were injured in the wild and then taken into Silurian zoos where they were rehabilitated.

You made my day with the image you conjured!

Fire = automation

>In particular, I believe the domestication of fire is the dividing line between humans and animals.

Must there be only 1 line? To me, language is another important one as it greatly increases the efficiency that one can communicate information generation to generation and it seems to have an impact on how we think. Children raised without exposure to language seem to suffer developmental issues, though this isn't well studied given the ethical issues involved in such a study.

As to how much communication is needed to count as a language, that is much harder to draw a definite line given that other species do communicate, but we don't consider them to have a language.

Language seems to me to be a gradient that extends well into other species. My cats for example communicate with me quite a bit. Even deer do so. They only have a couple of "words" but it's obvious they intend to communicate distinct concepts.

We don't even know when humans domesticated fire, though it certainly long predates the rise of civilization by any reasonable definition.

Certainly fire was a killer app for early hominids, but it doesn't mean it is a necessary step, nonetheless the necessary step on the road to intelligence.

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