Comment on If someone was shrunk down to the size of an ant would they be able to make a little ant sized campfire with the same principles? Does it scale like that?

muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

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.

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