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?

• LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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

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• Crozekiel@lemmy.zip ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Yea probably within an order of magnitude or so - then again, elephants are probably within an order of magnitude of size of humans. I don’t see why elephants couldn’t eventually evolve to an intelligent civilisation, given enough time. I’d say that’s still pretty large.

    But yea I mean the blue whale and the largest dinosaurs are probably about the limit of how large life can get, at least with Earth conditions.

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