Ooh! I have actually experimented with fire scaling myself. To some extent, a scaled down campfire can work, but at a different burn rate. I once made a tiny hearth and experimented for a while at making tiny fires in it. I found that within the range I was trying, a little scale model of a fire that worked well at full scale worked just as well at mini scale, just on a much faster time scale.
For example, if I had a human scale teepee style fire burning, say 1 to 2 inch diameter sticks at about 12 to 18 inches long, I’d need to toss another stick on it roughly every 1 to 5 minutes to maintain a nice blaze. Scaled down to sticks about 1/8th that size, I needed to feed it a stick every few seconds to maintain it. Much smaller and I wouldn’t have been able to move my tweezers fast enough to keep it fed.
The interaction of different stick sizes also scales that way. If I was to add a couple of eight inch wide split wedges on that same human scale fire, then once those caught, I could slow down feeding the smaller sticks into it to about 1 every 10 minutes, and still keep the same flame size as long as the larger pieces last. Likewise on the same mini fire as above, I could add a few 1 inch wide split wedges, and slow down to feeding it a little stick every 10 seconds.
The size I was playing with could be considered, say, mouse sized. By the time you scaled down to ant sized, the time scale would be so exaggerated as to be meaningless to compare to human sized fires. This isn’t taking into account any additional non-obvious factors that change how it behaves. So no, ant sized campfires are not possible. Mouse sized scale campfires are possible, but only if you tend them constantly and quickly.
Also, I didn’t take any precise measurements, I was just making tiny fires to relax. All numbers above are just rough estimates from memory, so you can’t really calculate how the scaling works from this, only that is sort of does work, within limits.
Can’t believe I’d see a decently thought provoking question I’d never considered to be met with a subject matter expert in this way. You’re awesome.
This would make a really excellent YouTube channel, just voiceover, same style as perpetual stew. Burn tiny things every day.
For the campfire to scale down like that it also needs more oxygen in the atmosphere. Otherwise you will just get some smoldering wood shavings(or they will turn into a candle fire in size if there enough of them close together). In both cases such campfire will exist for a very short time.
I’m answering in hopes that someone else who knows more will answer.
I think, no. Just because if you look at a small flame, like a candle, it isn’t the same as a campfire. An ant-sized fire would be, supposedly, like a much smaller candle flame, but it’s hard to imagine such a thing. I’ve never seen such a small flame, I think they can’t exist. Why? I don’t know. Imagine a spark from a fire, which would be about the size of an ant fire. It burns out quickly because there’s so little fuel--fewer molecules, fewer bonds to break, maybe that’s it. It’s a small amount to us, but not to an ant, but it would still burn out just as quickly. So, there must be some lower physical limit to fires acting like fires as we experience them at our scale. Bigger fires also behave differently to smaller fires. They’re more violent, and “create their own weather”, like you hear when there are forest fires.
There is a theory that if alien life exists, those organisms will be roughly our size. The reasoning is that you can’t achieve advanced civilisation without fire, and you can’t tend a fire if you’re much smaller or larger than a human.
Not my theory, but an interesting thing to consider
Smaller I suppose, but larger? Why not? Wouldn’t you just have a really large fire?
I don’t know specifically about fire but I think the square-cube law plays a significant factor in the idea that alien life would be similar in scale to humans.
Bigger fires burn out quicker cause they burn hotter.
But maybe you wouldn’t need as much fire cause bigger animals tend to hold heat better?
Curious what the actual research reasoning would be.
But maybe you wouldn’t need as much fire cause bigger animals tend to hold heat better?
I thought the same thing. Then again, fire is not only needed for heat, but also for cooking food and creating new materials (metallurgy essentially). But surely a large creature could just make fires the same size as humans do if they needed to do those things? But perhaps it’d be impractical to cook food at a tiny fire hehe
I find that theory fascinating, as well as the one where it would have to be carbon based like us because chemistry. (Silicon a distant second on supporting chemistry that a life form might need)
Then intelligent life would need to be land based because you can’t easily do things requiring heat without an oxygen atmosphere and something to burn (an octopus or porpoise might be intelligent but that’s a dead end without fire)
To be space faring, your planet couldn’t have much more gravity than earth, else chemical rockets wouldn’t work
At what point is it usefully generalizing on what any life form would need vs where are preconceptions limiting your thinking?
What about using heat from geothermal vents?
I’ve never heard that before! It’s interesting.
I think it depends a ton on environmental conditions. Could combustion on planets with different gravity and pressure take place at different scales?
Fire is a thermodynamics problem, so it relates to area and volume, not gravity.
Gravity does impact creature size, however. A lower-gravity environment supports larger creatures, higher forces creatures to go smaller. Thought is a chemical process though, so that would have a minimum size as well.
I’ve never seen such a small flame, I think they can’t exist. Why? I don’t know.
Your intuition is correct and it’s quite simple really. A small fire cools down faster than it can keep/generate its own heat.
Surface area of the fire (which correlates with how quickly it cools) grows with the square of the size of the fire. Meanwhile volume of the fire (which correlates to how much heat it generates, how much fuel it is burning) grows with the cube.
At small sizes, the surface area can win out against the volume. However, because it grows with the cube, the volume eventually wins as the fire gets bigger. So a fire can only get so small.
Kinda like the square cube law.
Not kinda, exactly like it - it is just another example of it :)
Too much oxygen. A tiny little campfire would be like a massive, and very short lived inferno to the “ant” that built it, because the ratio of oxygen to fuel is perfect for human size creatures but way too high to sustain a tiny fire for a long time.
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If you scale a human down to the size of an ant (somehow?), they would quickly die. Our metabolism is very slow, we don’t generate enough heat to be alive at those sizes. Since our mass would scale down with the power of 3 and our surface area with the power of 2, the mass to surface area ratio becomes such we would quickly cool down and die.
This among the many many other issues a tiny body would have.
As for creating fire by friction I assume? There needs to be a concentrated amount of energy to create enough heat. Such a energy output would be impossible for something that small.
But say you get a bunch of tiny sticks and somehow also have it catch fire. It still wouldn’t work, since the speed the fuel burns is related to the amount of available resources. So you could definitely set some tiny amount of sticks on fire, but it would burn the same as you would do it yourself at current scale. So a little flame, similar to a candle probably and burn that tiny amount of fuel in 3 secs. Compared to the tiny size, the fire would be pretty large.
So no, it doesn’t scale like that at all. Scaling stuff like that is all make belief, so you can make up the rules as you go along.
Not only that, but at insect scales air has a much higher viscosity so it would be like trying to breathe molasses
Not really, but yeah.
To help answer your question, you can also think about what happens to a fire when you scale it up. This thought experiment will help guide you on whether the scaling is linear, or by volume (cubed) or perhaps even more dramatic than that. In the case of fire, if you imagine a campfire that is 10x the width, 10x the height, and 10x the depth, you are probably looking at a fire that has not 10x the energy, but more like 1000x the energy. It’s got a massive energy output compared to a modest campfire, it is going to consume a lot more than 10x as much fuel, and it’s potentially going to set stuff on fire and consume it and keep trying to consume more fuel in a way that you wouldn’t expect a 10x sized campfire to, and it is a huge emergency that is difficult to put out for that reason. It’s not just a 10x bigger fire because you scaled it up in 3 dimensions. It’s a vastly bigger monster.
So vice versa, if you’re scaling your body from roughly 1.8 meters to 1.8 milllimeters, that’s a 1000x reduction, so you might want to take your campfire down to 1/1000th of its human-sized dimensions too. But you’re probably not looking at a fire that scales down to 1/1000th with you, you’ll be looking at a fire that only has 1/1000th-cubed or 1 billionth as much energy. That is a very small amount of energy, it will barely do anything or even be noticeable at that scale. It may not even sustain a flame. And if you want a campfire with more proportional energy like 1/1000th of a regular campfire for your ant-sized campfire, that means you’ll need a campfire that is still 1/10th the physical dimensions of your human-sized campfire. So it’s still a really, really big fire relative to your ant-sized body. It’s maybe the size of a large candle or alcohol burner, but that’s HUGE compared to ant-size dimensions. So no, put quite simply, it doesn’t scale like that.
These estimations are approximate and there are probably even more complex scaling factors at play for something as physically complex as fire at such extreme scales, but that should help give you the general idea. You’d probably need much more thorough study and experimentation to get a better idea, unless somebody has already scientifically researched this which wouldn’t surprise me.
Excellent answer.
On a side note: if I could get my ant colony to build small camp fires we could create some ugly forest fires, or some nasty building fires in large cities.
Your best point of reference is, without being facetious, the movie A Bug’s Life.
You probably could with small enough woody materials, but at that size they’ll incinerate pretty quickly unless the density of the woody material in your campfire was equivalent to that of real life to support similar fire behaviour.
Density generally doesn’t scale with reduction in size, so what would usually be a solid tree log that burns slowly at 1:1 scale, would probably be equivalent to dry straw or grass blades at 1:200 scale.
(scale numbers spit-balled: no science behind them)
Not at all.
Same principles? Yes. Same ratio of ingredients? Technically yes. (it’s the same chemical reactions with the same ratios of input/output)
Though smaller things tend to be easier to light on fire. Think of how things like flour and metal dust are flammable. Steel wool is flammable. You gather small dry brush and twigs to make the foundation for a bigger fire, for crying out loud!
Though you’d be having a lot more problems with your body’s biology. Your blood wouldn’t work. Wouldn’t circulate. Your lungs would feel like you were breathing a thick liquid and also wouldn’t work. Your muscles to skeleton ratio would be all out of wack (I ‘think’ it’d go that you’d have too strong of bones, but I forget how biomechanics scale way up or way down). You’d probably freeze to death very quickly too, even if your biology ran fine.
No. Ur limited by thermodynamic heat transfer. Cooling happens as a function of the surface area. Heat generation happens as a function of the volume. Once u have below some critical internal heat/temperature fire becomes unsustainable as u don’t have enough energy to decompose the next fuel particle.
So let’s for simplicity model a fire as a sphere this is shape of largest volume to surface areas so best case scenario for a fire. Despite this as the sphere gets smaller u have less volume per surface area and thus the cooling outpaces the heat generation and ur fire dies. The heat gen rate per unit volume would also depends on the sociometric makeup and volatility of fuel etc etc.
