A Techno-Historical Analogy in Which YOU Are the Hero

How would you, some Homo erectus guy, respond to the invention of on-demand fire? 🔥

Apr 06, 2023

Hamza destroys some Zoroastrian relics through fire, from Mughal Emperor Akbar’s collection (late 16th century)

It is the Paleolithic, and you are a Homo erectus.

Your tribe has been using fire for some time, when you find it on a tree after thunderstorm. Fire is useful; it makes food tastier; it repels wild beasts; it makes life less miserable on cold nights. But until today it was only an occasional luxury, because you needed the gods to send a thunderstorm. Now, however, one of your cousins has devised a method to create it on demand, using some complicated process involving the friction between sharp stones. He demonstrates this to you. After five minutes of rubbing the sharp stones together, a spark comes out and lights a pile of dried plant matter on fire. After a few seconds, a bright flame dances in front of your eyes.

What is your immediate reaction?

If you are excited by the potential of this new technology for things like hunting and cooking, go to p. 4.
If you like the idea but worry about the risk of destruction because of accidental wildfires or lethal intra-tribe conflict, go to p. 15.
If you are alarmed that this invention might anger the gods and ultimately bring the downfall of Homo erectus, go to p. 22.

p. 4: yay, tastier cooking!

You learn from your cousin how to create fire yourself. Then, using a spear sharpened with fire, you kill a large beast, and then you make another fire to cook it. You organize a feast for the tribe. Everyone is impressed and your status greatly increases. You experiment some more with cooking techniques until you become by far the most skilled person in the entire savanna. Your reputation knows no bounds; people from faraway tribes travel to taste your slow-cooked meat and learn your secrets.

You daydream about a future age where fire is perfected further, maybe a kind of contraption in which the godlike powers of thunder can be tapped in on demand to cook food in various novel ways. As you lay in the grass thinking of this, another tribe invades yours and kills you with a fire-sharpened spear. You recognize the killer as you exhale your last breath: he was one of your students to whom you taught fire-making six moons ago.

Two million years later, Homo erectus and everything you’ve ever cared about are extinguished forever, but another species of human has created a contraption in which the godlike powers of thunder can be tapped in on demand to cook food in various ways. The End.

p. 15: safety protocols

You convince your cousin that mastering fire, while potentially useful, is a great danger and responsibility. The two of you devise a plan: you will keep the technique a secret, but use fire as part of a religious setup. It is, after all, a power too great for Homo erectus to yield, literally. Only you and your cousin, chosen by the gods, can be trusted with it.

You both become priest-kings of your tribe. When someone needs fire, they come to your richly decorated cave and pay you some seashells or animal skins. You then pronounce some deep incantations they don’t understand and give them multiple warnings, after which you give them a branch with some fire on it. Anyone who attempts to create fire on their own, or tries to sell your sacred fire to others, is punished and ostracized. This is the only way, you and your cousin think, to reap the benefits of fire while avoiding a catastrophic outcome.

You seem to be vindicated when a neighboring tribe accidentally causes a wildfire that destroys their hunting grounds and makes many of them starve to death. Under your leadership, your more careful tribe subjugates the survivors of the careless one, and thus begins a glorious imperial era. Some of your descendants evolve into a smarter species of humans who keeps your legacy alive by inventing metallurgy, glassmaking, steam engines, and spacefaring rockets, but also monotheism, hereditary monarchy, and regulatory government agencies. Lit by the light of the carefully monitored flame, the future is bright. The End.

p. 22: doom and gloom

You slap your cousin in the face. What the hell is he thinking? This “invention” of “on-demand fire” is wrong. It’s disgusting. It is trying to play god. After swearing at you profusely for the slap, your cousin explains that he didn’t think this was consequential in the slightest: it’s just a fun gimmick to impress the tribe’s ladies. You sigh. He doesn’t understand. If this invention gets out, people will use it to kill other people, and there’s no way to guarantee that your tribe will win. What if there’s a war and warriors accidentally burn so much of the savanna that the whole earth is turned into a desert, killing off all Homo erectus?

With the cooperation of the tribe’s elders, you instigate a ban on all sharp stones. Anyone found in possession of one shall be ostracized. You also develop a new taboo against naturally occurring fire. None of you were ever meant to use this force of the gods, anyway. It’s safer like this.

Some time later, however, you find that another tribe has independently invented on-demand fire. This is worrying: they have clearly become immensely strong by exploiting the forbidden power, and are now expanding across the savanna. They even call themselves the Fire Tribe. It looks like conflict with them is inevitable, and you’re likely to lose. What do you do?

If you use diplomacy and trade to establish good relations with the Fire Tribe, go to p. 34.
If you attack the Fire Tribe preemptively, go to p. 40.
If you do nothing, go to p. 47.

p. 34: the economically sensible solution

You send emissaries to the Fire Tribe and shower their leader with gifts. It works: you sign an agreement with the tribe that they will leave your hunting grounds alone if you also let them do what they want on their land. An uneasy trade begins. Your tribe has some rare plants that the Fire Tribe wants, and they give you some of their stuff in exchange, like metal objects that they’re making with fire. The conservatives among you, including yourself, are suspicious, but you can’t deny that the metal objects are useful. Both tribes prosper.

Over time, the usefulness of the Fire Tribe’s technology, along with their cultural prestige, weakens the taboos against fire in your own tribe. The young ones just don’t see fire as a danger. You, now an elder, try to impart to them the wisdom of the past, but it doesn’t really work. People use sharp stones for fire-making without bothering with hiding them anymore. The culture is changing.

Your figure that this how things usually go. You’re old, you don’t like change. It is sad to see your values being betrayed. But what can you do? At least no fire-related catastrophe has occurred; just very manageable accidents. Hopefully things stay that way. You die a peaceful death at an advanced age, and your descendants bury you with some metal tools they made with fire. The End.

p. 40: war is peace

You gang up with other warriors and launch a preemptive strike on the Fire Tribe’s main camp at night. Their fire torches have made them very easy to spot. So dumb, lol. Lmao, even. This observation makes you hopeful for the future: if pro-fire tribes become more vulnerable due to the use fire itself, that means easy dominance for the rightful anti-fire tribes like your own.

You and your warriors charge ahead. A bloody battle begins, lit by the torches and a bit of moonlight. Some of your tribesmen die; but many more do among the Fire Tribe people. The enemy is using fire as a weapon, but fortunately it isn’t a decisive advantage. At some point in the chaos of the battle, a very tall flame appears: one of the wooden huts has caught fire. Soon, the fire spreads across the dry grass to the other tents and huts. The camp falls prey to gigantic flames.

Victory! you think, smiling. The Fire Tribe is in disarray. Everything they own is being destroyed. You round up the survivors and keep them as prisoners. Then you attempt to march back to your camp.

You can’t: a large wall of flame blocks the way. The fire is spreading quickly across the savanna in all directions. Fuck, you think. Fuck, fuck, fuck. One of your predictions is coming true: fire, this wrath of the gods in physical form, is devastating the land.

You and some — not all — of the warriors and prisoners survive by diving into a nearby brook. You stay in the water for a full day and a full night while everything around you burns. When the dawn breaks, there is no longer a savanna. The landscape is a desert, as far as the eye can see. Rock and ashes everywhere and no life of any kind. Starvation awaits. Your tribesmen kill off the prisoners one by one and cannibalize them. It is disgusting and foul. You refuse to eat any Homo erectus flesh. You progressively get weaker, and some of your kin have to carry you the last miles as you walk back to your camp.

The camp is gone. Your tribe has vanished in wisps of smoke and soot. You weep. You were right: fire is a godlike danger, and it has now been unleashed in its full fury. How much you would have preferred to be wrong! you think as you fall unconscious from the hunger, never to wake up. The End.

p. 47: wu wei

As your extremely distant descendants would one day say, in a tongue that no one will ever speak, “que sera, sera.” Whatever will be, will be.

You think the taboos were the correct response. Fire is dangerous and shouldn’t be made. But then there’s a clear evolutionary advantage to doing so. The Fire Tribe is evidently highly successful; it could easily subjugate your tribe, or force it to transform due to economic incentives alone. Obviously, the same pressures will apply to any future technologies, too, whether that’s metal-working or something else. It’s not really a force you can stop.

Maybe that’s for the best. Old values will die out, and old men will be sad, but the world will improve at each generation. Your descendants, perhaps, will live in an unimaginable utopia. That utopia would be extremely weird to you if you were somehow transported into it, and you would hate it so much. But its people will think it’s just normal. They’ll live good lives. That’s what matters, right?

Or maybe the uncontrollable force of technology is doomed to destroy Homo erectus sooner or later. Maybe fire isn’t the one, just like the invention of spears didn’t cause widespread disaster. If you’re lucky, there’ll be hundreds and thousands of inventions, and thousands, even millions of years before doom happens. But it seems highly optimistic to believe it never will.

… Or not. You have no idea, honestly. You’re just some Homo erectus guy. You’re tired of trying to think of all the ramifications of this one invention. It seems dumb to just rely on historical analogies: fire really could be different from everything that came before. Doom hasn’t happened, since otherwise you wouldn’t be here, but it doesn’t follow that doom cannot happen. Yet it also seems foolhardy to try to predict that it will happen based on what you know of fire, which is very little.

Que sera sera, then, but that’s not really an answer. You still need to choose how to live, right this moment. What to do? Maybe you should ask the gods.

Flip a coin twice. If you get heads then heads, go to p. 4. If it’s heads then tails, go to p. 15. If it’s tails-heads, go to p. 34. If tails-tails, go to p. 40.